When Chicken Soup Isn't Enough

In this collection of first-person narratives, 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.

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.

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.

Charles L. Bardes, MD, Weill Cornell Medical College:

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.

Kathleen Burke, RN-BC, BSN, UCSF Medical Center:

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.