Conflicted health care : professionalism and caring in an urban hospital

Resource Information

The work Conflicted health care : professionalism and caring in an urban hospital represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in San Francisco Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Conflicted health care : professionalism and caring in an urban hospital

Title remainder

professionalism and caring in an urban hospital

Statement of responsibility

Ester Carolina Apesoa-Varano and Charles S. Varano

Creator

• Apesoa-Varano, Ester Carolina, 1975-

Contributor

• hoopla digital

Author

• Apesoa-Varano, Ester Carolina, 1975-

Subject

• Hospital patients -- Services for
• Hospitals -- Medical staff
• Electronic books
• Medical personnel and patient
• Medical personnel -- Attitudes
• Hospital care

Language

eng

Summary

Anyone who has spent time in a hospital as a patient or family member of a patient hopes that those who attend to us or our loved ones are at their professional best and that they care for us in ways that console us and preserve our dignity. This book takes an intimate look at how health care practitioners struggle to live up to their professional and caring ideals through (or during?) twelve-hour shifts on the hospital floor. From 3,200 hours of participant-observation and 500 hours of follow-up interviews with twenty-one doctors, thirty registered nurses, twenty-one respiratory therapists, twenty medical social workers, and eighteen occupational, physical, and speech therapists, the authors create a complex picture of the workplace conflicts that different types of health care practitioners face. Though all these groups espouse caring ideals, professional interests and a curative orientation dominate in patient care and interoccupational relations. Because emotive caring is not supported by the organization of health care in the hospital, it becomes an individual virtue that overworked staff find hard to perform, and it takes on an ideological form that obscures the status hierarchy among practitioners. Conflicts between practitioners rest upon the ranking of each group's knowledge base. They manifest in efforts to work as a team or set limits on practitioner responsibilities and in differing views on unionization

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

362.11068/3

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Target audience

adult