Hospital
Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids
A warts-and-all exploration of the struggles suffered and triumphs achieved by America's health-care professionals, Hospital follows a year in the life of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which serves a diverse multicultural demographic. Unraveling the financial, ethical, technological, sociological, and cultural challenges encountered every day, bestselling author Julie Salamon tracks the individuals who make this complex hospital run-from doctors, patients, and administrators to nurses, ambulance drivers, cooks, and cleaners. Drawing on her skills as an award-winning interviewer, observer, and social critic, Salamon reveals the dynamic universe of small and large concerns and personalities that, taken together, determine the nature of care in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this remarkable portrait of the doctors and administrators at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center, bestselling author Salamon (The Devil's Candy; The Christmas Tree) illustrates the complex machine that is the modern hospital, vying to provide cutting-edge facilities and compassionate care, while making money doing it. Salamon compares Maimonides to a factory, where medicine is "industrialized," streamlined for efficiency and as dependent on skilled administrators as on talented physicians. Located in a Brooklyn neighborhood known for its simmering mix of ethnicities and cultures, particularly its influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, Maimonides is insanely busy, with perhaps the most densely packed emergency room of its size. A new resident in obstetrics learns to "count to ten and say 'push' in Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, and at least two other languages that I'm not sure what they were." Administrators juggle budgets, politics and feuding staff while insurance paperwork increases mistakes and steals treatment time. Although it's "hard to deconstruct the Tower of Babel when you're standing in the middle of it," Salamon succeeds in providing a completely unique, three-dimensional and compellingly human perspective of the demanding work both frustrating and rewarding that is not always apparent to hospital patients and their families.
