num_pages: 255
description: Crisis in caring: an award-winning journalist delivers a dramatic account ofthe challenges and opportunities of nursing today.No one goes through life untouched by nurses. They are there to cradle usat birth, care for us when we are sick or injured and offer comfort atdeath. Yet nursing has not only been an invisible profession, but a silentone. Only recently have we begun to hear from Canada's nurses, as theyreact to cutbacks, job losses, overwork, and lack of respect for theirskills. These grievances have resulted in unprecedented shortages and alife-threatening crisis.In Critical Care award-winning journalist Andre Picard brings us to thefront lines of the nursing crisis, providing a remarkable portrait of thestate of the profession through the eyes of nurses themselves. Heinterviewed more than 40 nurses and what he discovered is, in some cases,shocking, in others, heartbreaking. Yet the stories reaffirm our image ofnurses as caring, knowledgeable and dedicated - invaluable members ofCanada's public health system.Take Kim Widger, a pediatric oncology nurse who every day has to answerquestions like: "What does it feel like to die?" Or Karen Johnson, a traumanurse and educator, as she describes the rigors of the "trauma season," theperiod between May 24 and Thanksgiving, when there is a lethal mixture ofmany more cars on the road and increased alcohol consumption by young men.Or Penny Triggs, a medical evacuation nurse working for a private airambulance service in Nunavut. or Cathy Crowe, a nurse-practitioner whosework with the homeless has transformed her into a political activist.Woven throughout Critical Care is Andre Picard's insightful commentary onthe challenges of contemporary nursing, plus a passionate and thoughtfulprescription for change. This is a book not just of interest to those inthe health field, but to anyone who cares about the future of health care.About The Author:Andre Picard is The Globe and Mail's public health reporter. He is theauthor of the acclaimed The Gift of Death: Confronting Canada's TaintedBlood Tragedy, which won the Science in Society Journalism Award and wasshortlisted for both the Gordon Montador Award for Public Policy Journalismand the Q-SPELL Award for non-fiction. He also received a Michener Awardfor Meritorious Public Service Journalism and a National Newspaper Awardnomination for his coverage of the scandal. One of the top public policywriters in Canada, Andre Picard traveled across the country to researchCritical Care and was offered unparalleled access to nurses on the job.
language: English
title: Critical Care : Canadian Nurses Speak for Change
publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Canada, Limited