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Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids | 
 enlarge | Author: Julie Salamon
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy Used: $2.95
You Save: $23.00 (89%)
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 24625
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594201714
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.110974723
EAN: 9781594201714
ASIN: 1594201714
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | Paperback - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids | | • | Audio CD - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids | | • | Audio CD - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids | | • | Audio CD - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids | | • | Hardcover - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids | | • | Audio Cassette - Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) | | • | Kindle Edition - Hospital | | • | Audio Download - Hospital (Unabridged) |
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Product Description
A bestselling author and award winning journalist follows a year in the life of a big urban hospital, painting a revealing portrait of how medical care is delivered in America today
Most people agree that there are complicated issues at play in the delivery of health care today, but those issues may not always be what we think they are. In 2005, Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, unveiled a new state-of-theart, multimillion-dollar cancer center. Determined to understand the whole spectrum of factors that determine what kind of medical care people receive in this country, bestselling author Julie Salamon spent one year tracking the progress of the center and getting to know the characters who make the hospital run. Located in a community where sixty-seven different languages are spoken, Maimonides is a case study for the particular kinds of concerns that arise in institutions that serve an increasingly multicultural American demographic. Granted an astonishing warts and all level of access by the hospital higher-ups, Salamon followed the doctors, patients, administrators, nurses, ambulance drivers, cooks, and cleaning staff. She explored not just the action on the ground what happens between doctors and patients but also the financial, ethical, technological, sociological, and cultural matters that the hospital community encounters every day.
Drawing on her skills as interviewer, observer, and social critic, Salamon presents the story of modern medicine, uniquely viewed from the vantage point of those who make it run. She draws out the internal and external political machinations that exist between doctors and staff as well as between hospital and community. And she grounds the science and emotion of medical drama in the financial realities of operating a huge, private institution that must contend with issues like adapting to the specific needs of immigrant groups that make up a large and growing portion of our society.
Salamon exposes struggles of both the profound and humdrum variety. There are bitter internal feuds, warm personal connections, comedy, egoism, greed, love, and loss. There are rabbinic edicts to contend with as well as imams and herbalists and local politicians. There are system foul-ups that keep blood test results from being delivered on time, careless record keepers, shortages of everything except forms to fill, recalcitrant and greedy insurance reimbursement systems, and the surprising difficulty of getting doctors to wash their hands.
This is the dynamic universe of small and large concerns and personalities that, taken together, determine the nature of our care and assume the utmost importance. As Martin Payson chairman of the board at Maimonides and ex-Time-Warner vice chairman puts it: Hospitals have a lot in common with the movie business. You ve got your talent, entrepreneurs, ambition, ego stroking, the business versus the creative part. The big difference is that in the hospital you don t get second takes. Movies are make-believe. This is real life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Awesome Book, Read it One Sitting May 19, 2008
M. Warshawsky (Woodmere, NY)
24 out of 25 found this review helpful
Ok so maybe I am a little biased because I actually work at the hospital where this book was conceived and written.
Seriously though, Ms. Salamon has has manged somehow to give an overview of Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn that is both accurate and wonderfully descriptive. She has succesfully captured the flavour of Brooklyn and Maimonides in an entertaining yet authentic way.
This is not one of those PR stunts to try make Maimonides famous and rich, rather it is a soul searching account of the most horrendous and uplifting experiences that go hand in hand when an urban hospital meets multiple cultures.
At the end of the day it is a book about human emotions and human deficiencies.
Ego and humility, arrogance and compassion mixed with a healthy dose of back stabbing and genuine love for humanity.
Highly recomended.
A powerful case study of our baffling health care system May 24, 2008
A. Harmon (Los Angeles)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
That Maimonides Medical Center granted this writer such unfettered access to the institution is indeed astonishing, and Salamon does not squander the opportunity. What she finds is a health care pressure cooker: Ludicrous insurance protocols, cultural divides among patients and an exhausted staff prone to ego and petty feuds, and sometimes profound compassion.
But General Hospital melodrama the book is not. What I found instead was an illuminating portrayal of our broken health care system, without the gross oversimplification that presidential political campaigns are apt to use in endless sound bytes.
Salamon's prose is at its best when she documents the experience of Maimonides cancer patients--real people in pain, often lacking insurance and citizenship, praying for miracles and avoiding the awful truth as best they can. Salamon thankfully avoids turning these tragic stories into overwrought narrative thread. Her voice is simple and frank, and therefore irresistible. A powerful work.
Send Me the Sequel May 27, 2008
C. B. Terrigno (Wilmington, Ohio USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I purchased this book for my children to give to their father on Father's Day. He trained at Maimonides when we were newlyweds and I thought he would enjoy receiving it from his sons who were born there in Brooklyn.
I began to glance through it and I was compelled to cancel my appointments and read it completely. Wow, the memories came flooding back to me.
In the early and mid eighties, we spent a great deal of time interacting with a group of people who were foreign to me in both physical and spiritual identity. The Orthodox Jewish community provides an integral part of her story and it is fascinating.
Like the author, I am from Ohio. But, unlike Ms Salamon, I had no idea who Maimonides was and why would he have a hospital in Brooklyn named for him? It was a life-altering experience for me to learn the differences between various New York cultures and and this is the insight Ms Salamon provides throughout this book.
The reader becomes enthralled with the personalities of the physicians, administrators and staff and Ms Salamon is concise and accurate in recalling events that establish their identities. However, it is the wrenching descriptions of actual procedures as well as the reactions of young and terminally ill patients that keeps this book from becoming another hospital tell-all.
I am very impressed with this book and I greatly anticipate reading her earlier books and essays.
A fabulous book June 8, 2008
Charles Durfee (Woolwich, ME)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a fabulous book. It is easy to forget that it is not fiction; the characters and the situation and setting are fascinating and their depth and complexities so well portrayed. The story itself is at once inspiring, depressing, hopeful and overwhelming. Maimonides Hospital is unique, but really this book is about every medical practice. Over and over again I felt an odd sense that this was about my practice in a small Maine town... a practice that is homogenous in every way that is easily described in demographics, but as diverse as every face and family and experience. Ms. Salamon gets it exactly right: that health care is emotional and spiritual and about human dynamics, both beautiful and ugly. Her writing of the Maimonides story so perfectly shows how nothing is simple in health care and yet it really is all very simple. Because this book truly is about humankind and our survival together, it is certainly a great read for anyone, not just readers in the medical field. (But a must read for everyone in the medical field!) (Jennifer Oddleifson)
How Hospitals Really Work June 8, 2008
H. Gleckman (Washington, D.C.)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Most of us see hospitals only from a patient's bedside or though overheated TV medi-dramas. But if you want to know how these complex health care machines really work, pick up Julie Salamon's Hospital. It is a sometimes uplifiting, sometimes frightening, look at how a combustible mixture of skill, ego, money, and compassion somehow turns into good medical care.
Salamon, who spent a year roaming both the corporate offices and the patient floors of Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, nails it. In some ways, this place could only happen in New York, but in others, it is just like every other hospital in America. Salamon, a keen observer and writer, tells the story of Maimonides through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters. If you want to know what our crazy health care system means for those in the trenches, including the patients, read Hospital.
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