Nursing Home Care

This book report is based on Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care by Timothy Diamond. The book was published by The University of Chicago Press. It consists of 280 pages, including index.

The main theme of Making Gray Gold is that nursing homes are bureaucratic institutions that could use a healthy dose of "mother's wit." Mother's wit describes the maternal feelings and interpersonal skills needed by all persons who give primary care to the elderly: "Mother's wit is not an abstract concept or a set of ideas; it is the wide range of practices that hold the organization together" (241). Nursing is a caring profession, and nowhere is compassion and insight more needed than in the sterile environment of the nursing home. As Diamond's instructor advised him, "You have to look into a patient's eyes as much as you can, and learn to get the signals from there" (17).

Diamond elaborates on his theme by recounting his experiences as a nursing assistant in various nursing homes in the United States. The author, a male, completed training as a nursing assistant and went "undercover" while gathering information for this ethnographic study. In other words, Diamond, a sociologist by education and training, rarely revealed that he was researching and writing this book. He realized that thorough immersion into the nursing home environment was required to investigate core living conditions.

The nursing assistants in the nursing homes Diamond investigated are const

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ome patients, he gives equally revealing insight into plight of the nursing assistants who provide primary care for the patients. The nursing assistants are overwhelming female, most in Diamond's study are African-American, and they are underpaid relative to the responsibilities they must assume. The subsistence wages paid to the nursing assistants forced them to work double shifts, or two jobs, or constantly search for extra work. In fact, the low wages paid nursing assistants often aroused suspicion for the author when he went on job interviews: "The administrator where I first applied for work understood the conflation of these gender, race, and class dynamics, summarizing them with his suspicious question, "Now why would a white guy want to work for these kinds of wages?" (187). Making Gray Gold relates to the study of medical sociology on many levels. The book deals with the elderly, death and dying, and illness. The health care delivery system is critiqued as is one of its major federal programs, Medicare. A largely ignored segment of the health care profession is examined, the critical role of the nursing assistant. And the field of health care administration is explored in depth. Making Gray Gold relates to wel

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