Code Green

We are on the verge of the nation's worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the quality of their nursing care, such as Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now struggle to fill vacant positions. What happened? Dana Beth Weinberg argues that hospital restructuring in the 1990s is to blame. In their attempts to retain profit margins or even just to stay afloat, hospitals adopted a common set of practices to cut costs and increase revenues. Many strategies squeezed greater productivity out of nurses and other hospital workers. Nurses' workloads increased to the point that even the most skilled nurses questioned whether they could provide minimal, safe care to patients. As hospitals hemorrhaged money, it seemed that no one—not hospital administrators, not doctors—felt they could afford to listen to nurses.Through a careful look at the effects of the restructuring strategies chosen and implemented by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the author examines management's efforts to balance service and survival. By showing the effects of hospital restructuring on nurses' ability to plan, evaluate, and deliver excellent care, Weinberg provides a stinging indictment of standard industry practices that underestimate the contribution nurses make both to hospitals and to patient care.

Beth Israel was an international benchmark hospital which many saw as setting the nursing standards to be achieved elsewhere. This account of its recent history carries important messages about the domination of economics over the need for nursing care, the fragility of even the best nursing leadership during amalgamations, and the ease with which a reputation can be lost., Hospital restructuring has fundamentally changed nurses' work and the very meaning of nursing. It has overlooked the therapeutic value of the nurse-patient relationship and the importance of 'knowing the patient.' Is it any wonder, then, that so many nurses are leaving the profession because of frustration and disillusionment? In the end, this hurts nurses as well as patients, physicians, and hospitals. Weinberg concludes that when designers draw up cost-effective plans for hospital restructuring, they must thoughtfully include nurses in their planning. The author is to be congratulated on bringing this important topic into view., Hospitals frequently devise a system of color codes to convey a message to their personnel succinctly and exclusively. Weinberg chooses 'code green' to refer to the financial crisis that hospitals are facing today, the ensuing trend to merge hospitals, and its implications for the nursing profession.... This thought-provoking book gives a uniquely personal perspective. It is suitable for specialized healthcare collections in academic, larger public, and medical libraries., In this thorough investigation into how the nursing profession has changed radically over the last decade, Weinberg cites hospital consolidation and 1997's Balanced Budget Act, which brought cuts to Medicare payments and severely affected hospitals' bottom line, as keys to the problem. The Brandeis University research associate uses the merger of Boston's prestigious Beth Israel Hospital with New England Deaconess as an example of how fiscal problems and consolidation are responsible for the growing shortage of nurses and rampant dissatisfaction in the field.... Weinberg's analysis will be important to medical professionals and hospital administrators., The author scrutinizes how and why hospitals, in the era of profit-driven health care, routinely exploit qualities such as empathy, dedication, and professionalism in nurses. Using human science research, she illustrates how nurses really are 'ripe for exploitation,' in part because we internalize responsibility for patient care, patient safety and the caring-healing process.

Dana Beth Weinberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College. Suzanne Gordon is an award-winning journalist, author of Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines, and coauthor of From Silence to Voice, also from Cornell.