A NICE NEAT OPERATION

by Muriel Beadle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 1975

Mrs. Beadle who wrote about university president hostessing in Where Has All the Ivy Gone? (1972) now considers some of the questions of hospital management via the typical gall bladder removal of a Mrs. Janet Miller in a large, not large enough, middle western community hospital serving a population which has tripled since it was built in 1948. There is a good deal of precise information on the tests to be done after admission, the routine prepping and scrubbing on to the operation itself. But in between--the more important in between--she indicates the problems of maintaining a ""full service hospital"" (i.e. ""keeping up with the Joneses"" which is uneconomical), the bureaucracy, the nurses who have lost their bedside contact to charts and medication, the housekeeping, the short-staffing throughout, etc. This has been achieved more substantively elsewhere--in complete books about the chronic invalid the hospital has become or Michael Crichton's Five Patients, etc. Mrs. Beadle's small achievement is that she has gotten a good deal of both explaining and excusing information together for the less informed woman irritated by more than her stitches.

Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION