Description
Book SynopsisTo cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. In Cleaning Up, the first book to examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, Dan Zuberi looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. Drawing on years of field research in Vancouver, Canada as well as data from hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, he argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the cleanliness of hospitalsleading to an increased risk of hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of severe illness and deathas well as for the effective delivery of other hospital services and the workers themselves.
Zuberi's interviews with the low-wage workers who keep hospitals running uncover claims of exposure to near-constant risk of injury and illness. Many report serious concerns about
Trade Review
Cleaning Up affords its readers crucial insight into the healthcare industry, closely examining thesocial and economic costs of profit-driven healthcare. Healthcare policy affects so many people:workers, patients, and all of their families. Zuberi succeeds in proving his point: it is time to take actionto improve our healthcare system.
-- Michelle A. Dressner * Monthly Labor Review *
A book like this could easily read as a litany of woe and injustice, but the finalchapter, simply titled Cleaning Up, seeks to provide a roadmap forward thataddresses HAIs and worker justice....The book is written in an engaging and polemical style and the subject matterlends itself to catchy chapter titles and by-lines.
-- Shaun Ryan * Journal of Industrial Relations *
Researchers sensitive to the plight of low-wage workers in advancedindustrialized economies have long sought to convey the magnitude ofthe problem by retelling sorrowful tales of worker exploitation. Sadly,even their most sympathetic readers have numbed to these accounts.Author Dan Zuberi has found a clever way to transcend this apathy inhis new monograph based on about 100 interviews plus behind-the-scenes observations of the impact of hospital support staff outsourcingon patients and workers.
-- Adam Seth Litwin * Work and Occupations *
While this empirically informed book makes for a quick and easy read, it is both informative and thought-provoking. Zuberi's book provides a wealth of evidence that the outsourcing of hospital jobs has resulted in deteriorating working conditions and that, in turn, such conditions are the cause of an increase in hospital acquired infections....undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature on the quality of care in hospitals and its links to the privatisation and out-sourcing of healthcare services.
-- Eleanor K. Johnson * Sociology of Health and Illness *
Table of Contents1. "Stuff Gets Missed": An Introduction to a Growing Health Care Crisis2. Germs, Blood, and Cost-Cutting: The Daily Struggle to Keep Hospitals Clean3. Compromising Cleanliness: How Outsourcing Keeps Hospital Workers from Doing Their Jobs4. Untrained Workers, Unfit Managers5. Breaking Up the Team6. Down and Out in Vancouver: Struggling, Stressed, and Exhausted Hospital Support Workers7. Cleaning UpNotes
References
Index
