Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, Paperback
Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 080147261X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780801472619
- Pub. Date:
- 07/18/2005
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 080147261X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780801472619
- Pub. Date:
- 07/18/2005
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide / Edition 1
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Overview
After caring for his mother at the end of her life, Thomas Edward Gass felt drawn to serve the elderly. He took a job as a nursing home aide but was not prepared for the reality that he found at his new place of employment, a for-profit long-term-care facility. In a book that is by turns chilling and graphic, poignant and funny, Gass describes America's system of warehousing its oldest citizens.
Gass brings the reader into the sterile home with its flat metal roof and concrete block walls. Like an industrial park complex, it is clean, efficient, and functional. He is blunt about the institution's goal: keep those faint hearts pumping and the life savings and Medicaid dollars rolling in. With 130 beds in the facility, the owner grosses about three million dollars annually. As a relatively well-paid aide, Gass made $6.90 an hour.
Seventeen of the twenty-six residents on Gass's hall were incontinent, and much of his initiation to the work was learning to care for them in the most intimate ways. One of the many challenges was the limited time that he had available for each of his charges—17.3 minutes per day by his calculation. Even as he learned to ignore all but the most pressing demands of the residents, he discovered the remarkable lengths to which aides and their patients will go to relieve the constant ache of loneliness at the nursing home.
With Americans living longer than ever before, elder care is among the fastest growing occupations. This book makes clear that there is a systemic conflict between profit and extent of care. Instead of controlling costs and maximizing profits, what if long-term care focused on our basic need to lead meaningful and connected lives until our deaths? What if staff members dropped the feigned hope of forestalling the inevitable and concentrated on making their charges comfortable and respected? These and other questions raised by this powerful book will cause Americans to rethink how nursing homes are run, staffed, and financed—as well as the circumstances under which we hope to meet our end.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801472619 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 07/18/2005 |
Series: | The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work |
Edition description: | New Edition |
Pages: | 224 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Foreword | ix | |
Editor's Note | xv | |
Preface | xxi | |
Acknowledgments | xxiii | |
The Setting | 1 | |
Initiation | 7 | |
The Cast | 13 | |
Regs | 57 | |
Back on the Hall | 63 | |
Nurses and Aides | 73 | |
Lot's Wife | 79 | |
Feeding | 83 | |
Back to Reality | 91 | |
After Breakfast | 111 | |
Aching Hearts | 115 | |
Baths | 125 | |
Life Goes On | 131 | |
Interactions | 137 | |
Late Shift | 145 | |
Back on Days | 157 | |
Epilogue | 177 |
What People are Saying About This
Thomas Edward Gass presents without embellishment a portrait of what life is like inside a modern nursing home. Nobody's Home lets the readers see the cruel tricks aging can play on residents, the frustrations of declining health, and the indignities of not being heard. This book shows us the physically tough and emotionally sapping work that aides have to do every day in a health care system and society where their work is not assigned the monetary or cultural value that it deserves. Gass shows what happens when there are simply not enough caregivers to provide that care the way we would want. This book gives us portraits of real people—residents and workers—who deserve better care and a better health care system. Members of Congress who do not have better nurse staffing at the top of their legislative agenda should read this book!
Those planning careers in nursing and allied health will find Gass's book a must-read. Readers will learn many lessons from the perspective of one of the most important caregivers in American nursing homesThe nursing home aide.... Gass gives the reader an honest picture of himself and what he gains from his experiences. Many important analogies and conclusions about health care and the quality of life may be drawn from this book. Anyone interested in a depiction of the universality of aging won't be disappointed. Recommended. General readers, undergraduates, faculty/researchers, and professionals/practitioners.
Nobody's Home is a brilliant ethnography, compelling and achingly vibrant and realistic. Thomas Edward Gass defines in human terms what it is like to be a frontline caregiver in a for-profit nursing facility, and he gives us an incredible sense of what it might be like to be a patient there. This book will surely be a tremendous resource for policymakers and for students of social work, aging, sociology, work organization, disability, and public policy.
I recommend this insightful and well-written book to all those who may want to know, or need to know, more about daily life in a nursing home from the perspective of the residents and the nurses' aides who provide their basic care. Although Thomas Edward Gass details the realities of toileting, feeding, and bathing often disoriented residents, he also discovers their more fundamental need for meaningful human connection and shows that this need is most often met, if it is met, by overworked and exhausted nurses' aides like himself.
Thomas Edward Gass simply refuses to avert his gaze from frail elderly and disabled residents' humanity, and so we witness the daily indignities of institutionalized care. The nursing home residents whom Gass must hurriedly turn and spoon feed and toilet have complex lives and rich histories, and throughout this heartrending account Gass reminds us regularly that, if we live long enough, we too will likely be reduced to medical charts listing our disabilities. Gass's recounting of small gestures of tenderness and moments of compassion provide us with glimpses of what it might mean to really care for the elderly—and how our current long-term care system fails miserably at that elemental task.
In this profoundly moving book, Thomas Edward Gass describes his experiences as a nursing home aide. He documents the daily struggles of nursing home residents to preserve their dignity in an often uncaring institutional environment but also shows great empathy for the poorly paid aides who provide that care. I intend to assign this book in all my classes on aging.
"Those planning careers in nursing and allied health will find Gass's book a must-read. Readers will learn many lessons from the perspective of one of the most important caregivers in American nursing homesThe nursing home aide.... Gass gives the reader an honest picture of himself and what he gains from his experiences. Many important analogies and conclusions about health care and the quality of life may be drawn from this book. Anyone interested in a depiction of the universality of aging won't be disappointed. Recommended. General readers, undergraduates, faculty/researchers, and professionals/practitioners."
Thomas Edward Gass describes beautifully the highs and lows of caring for people with dementia. He manages to see both the humanity and the humor in everyday experiences of nursing home residents and those who care for them. His philosophy, a unique combination of realism and universalism, has much to offer all of us as we try to make sense of our lives.