FootprintBooks

The reassuring bromides of 'chicken soup for the soul' provide little solace for nurses - and the people they serve - in real life hospitals, nursing homes, schools of nursing, and other settings. In the minefield of modern health care, there are myriad obstacles to quality patient care - including work overload, inadequate funds for nursing education and research, and poor communication between and within the professions, to name only a few. The seventy RNs whose stories are collected here by the award-winning journalist Suzanne Gordon know that effective advocacy isn't easy. It takes nurses willing to stand up for themselves, their coworkers, their patients, and the public.

When Chicken Soup Isn't Enough brings together compelling personal narratives from a wide range of nurses from across the globe. The assembled profiles in professional courage provide new insight into the daily challenges that RNs face in North America and abroad - and how they overcome them with skill, ingenuity, persistence, and individual and collective advocacy at work and in the community. In this collection, we meet RNs working at the bedside, providing home care, managing hospital departments, teaching and doing research, lobbying for quality patient care, and campaigning for health care reform. Their stories are funny, sad, deeply moving, inspiring, and always revealing of the different ways that nurses make their voices heard in the service of their profession. The risks and rewards, joys and sorrows, of nursing have rarely been captured in such vivid, first-person accounts. Gordon and the authors of the essays contained in this book have much to say about the strengths and shortcomings of health care today - and the role that nurses play as irreplaceable agents of change.

"When Chicken Soup Isn't Enough is an excellent collection capturing the real work done by nurses. It demonstrates that the triumphs and struggles of nurses are universal." - Kathleen Burke, RN-BC, BSN, UCSF Medical Center

"These stories show how nurses have stepped up their care to include advocating for patients and offering solutions to some of these problems while continuing to perform their duties with expertise and compassion. Increasingly, nurses are self-advocates who participate actively in determining the parameters of good patient care. . . . Each chapter is complete unto itself and a good read; taken as a whole, the chapters clearly suggest that nurses are defining and implementing important new roles for themselves in the modern health care delivery system—a development that bodes well for patients, the system, and nurses."—Choice, January 2011



Experts

"When Chicken Soup Isn't Enough is an excellent collection capturing the real work done by nurses. It demonstrates that the triumphs and struggles of nurses are universal."—Kathleen Burke, RN-BC, BSN, UCSF Medical Center

"These concise first-person narratives by nurses from around the world provide a magnificent testimony to the power of the nursing profession to effect change. Their common theme is to stand up, speak out, and take action against inadequate care, unsafe working conditions, physician arrogance, and outmoded, condescending conceptions of the nurse's role in contemporary health care. These are the voices of nurses who do not know their places—to the benefit of patients, and of us all."—Charles L. Bardes, MD, Weill Cornell Medical College

Suzanne Gordon is Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing and Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing. She is author of Life Support and Nursing against the Odds, coauthor of Safety in Numbers and From Silence to Voice, and coeditor of The Complexities of Care, all from Cornell.