When President Clinton launched his failed health care initiative, which launched the era of managed care, Gordon began to journalistically document the impact of managed care on patients and caregivers alike. She then spent three years at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, following three nurses for her book Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines. She wrote her first article on nursing, “ The Crisis in Caring” for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Socialized like so many others, only to focus on the role of physicians in healthcare, she was surprised to discover the importance of nurses in monitoring and managing her labor and delivery, making sure she and her baby were safe, and helping her to cope with her post-labor problems and learn how to take care of her baby. Gordon began writing about healthcare after she had her first baby at a small community hospital outside of Boston. The book challenged the myth that everything is beautiful at the ballet.

She also wrote a widely reviewed expose of ballet as work – Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet.

Early careerįor the first part of her career she wrote largely about political culture and women’s issues, writing Lonely in America (1996), a journalistic account of loneliness as a mass social problem in American society. She also helped found and write for Women: A Journal of Liberation, one of the first feminist journals in the US. Gordon has been a radio commentator for US CBS Radio and National Public Radio's Marketplace. She is currently working on a book about the innovations and clinical care at the Veterans Health Administration. She is author, co-author or editor of 18 books. Along with Sioban Nelson, she co-edits The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work Series at Cornell University Press. With Bernice Buresh, she is author of From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public, which is in its third edition. It also includes books about nursing’s contribution to health care including Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines, and Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care. Her work includes, First Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems of Patient Safety (Cornell University Press, 2012), a collection of essays edited with Ross Koppel and Beyond the Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Safety and Teamwork (Cornell University Press, 2012), written with commercial pilot Patrick Mendenhall and medical educator Bonnie Blair O’Connor, with a foreword by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Gordon coined the term “Team Intelligence,” to describe the constellation of skills and knowledge needed to build the kind of teams upon which patient safety depends.

Life Support by Suzanne Gordon