Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide
- Sheryl Zimmerman, PhD, Reviewer
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Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research and School of Social Work
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
sheryl_zimmerman@unc.edu
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
by Thomas Edward Gass (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work), 189 pp, paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8014-7261-X, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005.
There are at least two certainties in addition to taxes and death: no one wants to be a nursing home patient, and few people want to work in a nursing home. Yet 40% of those who turn 65 years will spend at least some time as nursing home patients, and 250 000 more nursing aides are needed to provide their care. These certainties arise from a multitude of problems with our present system of nursing home care, which have been, are, and will continue to be addressed (with a variable degree of success) through regulatory channels and practice innovation.
This attention notwithstanding, one of the most important components of nursing home care cannot be remedied by Big Brother. That component is at the core of Thomas Edward …
