The Door of Last Resort
Publication Year: 2013
Ward views nurse practitioners as important providers of primary health care (including the prevention of and attention to the root causes of ill health) in independent practice and as equal members of professional teams of physicians, registered nurses, and other health care personnel. She describes the education of nurse practitioners, their scope of practice, their abilities to prescribe medications and diagnostic tests, and their overall management of patients’ acute and chronic illnesses. Also explored are the battles that nurse practitioners have waged to win the right to practice—battles with physicians, health insurance companies, and even other nurses.
The Door of Last Resort, though informed by Ward’s experiences, is not a traditional memoir. Rather, it explores issues in primary health care delivery to poor, urban populations from the perspective of nurse practitioners and is intended to be their voice. In doing so, it investigates the factors affecting health care delivery in the United States that have remained obscure throughout the current national debate
Published by: Rutgers University Press
Title Series Info
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Download PDF (34.8 KB)
pp. vii-
Preface
Download PDF (68.5 KB)
pp. ix-xviii
I was born a first-generation American to immigrant Scottish parents who settled in Kearny, New Jersey. From a diachronic perspective, my life as nurse and nurse practitioner was grounded in my early growth in this town. Maturing in a loving home shaped by the values of hard-working immigrant British parents...
1. Bread Is Not Sugar
Download PDF (108.9 KB)
pp. 1-24
I arrived early at the health center. The large plastic clock with the drug name Protonix written in yellow and blue across its face reported the time as 7:30 a.m. While patients did not typically arrive earlier than 9 a.m., today was different. Darlene, my petite thirty-five-year-old African American patient with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes mellitus, left a message the day before that she wanted to see me today...
2. Health Care: Perspectives from the Street Level
Download PDF (163.2 KB)
pp. 25-63
As I walked down South Broad Street in Philadelphia in August 2010, wide sidewalks steamy with heat, I felt light, sure, confident. I had an appointment with Tine Hansen-Turton, JD, chief executive officer of the National Nursing Centers Consortium (the Consortium for short), an organization of nurse-managed health centers serving vulnerable...
3. Nurse, Are You a Doctor?
Download PDF (105.5 KB)
pp. 64-85
Scrub the area, Marta barked at me. The area was a 2.5-centimeter laceration over the left eyebrow of a twenty-three-year-old male patient. He had been struck in several locations with a baseball bat in a gang fight at the intersection of Springfield Avenue and Irvine Turner Boulevard in Newark. Brought in by the police, he remained feisty even after...
4. Protection of the Public or Creation of a Guild?
Download PDF (150.8 KB)
pp. 86-120
Head down against the wind, a dark brown woolen scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, Irene Fallon marched confidently on the icy street toward Newark City Hospital in Newark on December 4, 1901. Set against the crisp, deep blue evening sky, the hospital was a formidable four-story red brick structure, first occupied in 1890. The bright golden...
5. Context, Data, and Judgment: When is Enough, Enough?
Download PDF (143.8 KB)
pp. 121-153
In early spring of 2001, on a beautiful day, an unusual tableau of individuals sat together in the New York City office of Ambassador Joseph Mutaboba, permanent representative of Rwanda to the United Nations. As members of a health mission team going to Rwanda in May 2001, my colleague Carolyn and I had questions...
6. Barriers, Opportunities, and Militancy
Download PDF (139.3 KB)
pp. 154-184
From my recliner chair facing the head of Miss Millie’s bed, I anticipated that her twenty-second apneic period would be followed by a pattern of crescendo-decrescendo alteration in tidal volume—Cheyne-Stokes breathing, a pattern of breathing often noted in those with severe cerebral brain injury. As her respiratory depth increased in each...
Epilogue
Download PDF (54.7 KB)
pp. 185-192
Within the particular context of nursing practice, to lead is to be disruptive. The act of leading disrupts a status quo, invigorating context, welcoming change. When enacted by a marginalized group, leading disrupts. This relationship between leading and disrupting is not linear, but rather pan-dimensional and...
Index
Download PDF (66.1 KB)
pp. 193-200
About the Author
Download PDF (37.0 KB)
pp. 201-
Available Titles in Series
Download PDF (21.7 KB)
pp. 203-
E-ISBN-13: 9780813560540
E-ISBN-10: 0813560543
Print-ISBN-13: 9780813560533
Page Count: 224
Publication Year: 2013
Series Title: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine
Series Editor Byline: Rima D. Apple and Janet Goulden
