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A review by apatrick
the shift by Theresa Brown
4.0
I heard a snippet of an author interview on NPR one morning and it sounded pretty interesting. I'm glad I picked it up, because it was pretty good. Theresa Brown shows us what it's like to work on a hospital floor by describing just one day, in detail. It's packed with good insight, and Brown used to be an English teacher, which is reflected in the writing.
Having recently had a family member in the hospital gave me some context for this book. If you or someone you know is going to spend some time in the hospital, this is a good resource to remind you that you're not the only patient your nurse has to take care of, and you never know what kind of suffering s/he has to attend to the next room over.
Brown explains a lot of problems with our health care system, particularly the emphasis on charting over doing. In addition to doing all the things she does every day, she has to document everything, and I mean everything. For example, nurses used to only need to make notes of abnormalities when taking vital signs. It saved time for the person doing the charting and the person reading the chart, and it called attention to unusual results. Now, nurses have to make a note of everything, abnormal or normal, and that takes a lot of time. I used to complain about a similar issue in my former job as a retail manager (no time to do more because I'm stuck reporting the stuff I did!), and I can't imagine how much more frustrated I'd be if people's lives were at stake.
I would like to read a similar memoir by a Canadian or a European and see how our care systems differ. There would likely be different issues, and different things to complain about, since health care is a complex system, but I think it would still be enlightening.
Having recently had a family member in the hospital gave me some context for this book. If you or someone you know is going to spend some time in the hospital, this is a good resource to remind you that you're not the only patient your nurse has to take care of, and you never know what kind of suffering s/he has to attend to the next room over.
Brown explains a lot of problems with our health care system, particularly the emphasis on charting over doing. In addition to doing all the things she does every day, she has to document everything, and I mean everything. For example, nurses used to only need to make notes of abnormalities when taking vital signs. It saved time for the person doing the charting and the person reading the chart, and it called attention to unusual results. Now, nurses have to make a note of everything, abnormal or normal, and that takes a lot of time. I used to complain about a similar issue in my former job as a retail manager (no time to do more because I'm stuck reporting the stuff I did!), and I can't imagine how much more frustrated I'd be if people's lives were at stake.
I would like to read a similar memoir by a Canadian or a European and see how our care systems differ. There would likely be different issues, and different things to complain about, since health care is a complex system, but I think it would still be enlightening.