Author criticizes managed health care, lauds nurses' role

Suzanne Gordon may be the most impassioned outsider to spring to the defense of nurses' roles in the current tumultuous health care system. The author -- who discussed her new book, Life Support, with an audience of dozens of Nursing students and professors -- criticized managed care and the unjust shifting of the health care burden away from health care professionals. "My mission now is to try to articulate the meaning of care in a system that I think really doesn't get it, even more than the medical profession doesn't get it," Gordon said. "We're up against people who don't understand the power of relationships," she added. Gordon pointed to the need to emphasize interpersonal relationships in an atmosphere of expanding power for managed care organizations -- which she said are turning health care into nothing more than a business. "We're facing an ideological addiction? or a new religion that the market can solve every problem," she explained. To reduce costs, many hospitals have replaced registered nurses with less expensive and less educated nursing aides -- which Gordon said is only one aspect of a system that is attempting to shift the health care burden away from medical professionals. She cited the example of having children care for their elderly parents, adding that women are usually stuck with the biggest part of the increased burden as "it has always been before." Life Support tells of three Boston nurses' struggles with the current health care system, and details the history of the nursing profession. Although she started out writing about ballet, Gordon's personal interests led her to explore the nursing field -- which she has written about ever since. And as a journalist in addition to an advocate, Gordon is a keen observer of how American society perceives the importance of a strong and personal health care system. Because they are beginning to be affected by managed care -- or "mismanaged care," as Gordon referred to it -- other writers are beginning to become interested in the problems facing health care systems. "There's a lot of fertile soil out there for ideas to get us out of the mess that we're in," Gordon noted. She added, however, that the general public still places blame on nurses that should really be directed at insurance companies and the managed care establishment. "When [the general public] gets poor nursing care, they have to think systematically [about the real causes of the problems]," she explained. First-year Nursing student Regina Oliver agreed that Gordon's "message is true," adding that "going into the profession now, it makes me nervous? I'm afraid that we're going to have to work in that environment. How do we do that?"