Edited by Dana Beth Weinberg (2003) Forwarded by Suzanne Gordon (ISBN 0-8014-3980-9, 213 pages, $25 hardcover)
Code Green: Money Driven Hospitals and The Dismantling of Nursing is a scholarly work that examines the impact of hospital cost reduction and restructuring on nursing practice at a merged hospital. The book is written for nurses and their works during the hospital restructuring. The author realistically describes and compares the work on what is happening in nursing care between two competitive hospitals, Beth-Israel and Deaconness in Boston, that have been merged into a giant hospital industry. The book illustrates various aspects of a merger, including comparisons of nursing productivity between primary nursing and other nursing models in relation to physician nurse relationships, quality of patient care, and financial and management, issues.
The title, Code Green, is a fantastic way to describe each situation and it signifies the upcoming dangers of changes in hospital environments with the restructuring. With low profit margins and borrowed restructuring strategies from the business sector, many hospitals experience themselves in a code green. The term Code Green is used in hospital industries as a facility failure that requires immediate interventions. In this book, "A code green indicates the dangers of market driven health care systems that emphasize profits over quality patient care" (p. xiv). In response to Code Green, hospitals have adopted the values of business rationality that emphasizes high productivity and low cost, without considering the quality. With the business standards, leaders in the-hospital health industries focus their attention on the concept of managed care to increase revenues while reducing costs. The consequences are that of poor quality of care and high stresses of nurses. The author vividly explains about the phenomenon of this cost containment using various research methods; observations,...