Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care

Women in Culture and Society

by Timothy Diamond

This first hand report on the work of nurses and other caregivers in a nursing home is set powerfully in the context of wider political, economic, and cultural forces that shape and constrain the quality of care for America's elderly. Diamond demonstrates in a compelling way the price that business-as-usual policies extract from the elderly as well as those whose work it is to care for them.

In a society in which some two million people live in 16,000 nursing homes, with their numbers escalating daily, this thought-provoking work demands immediate and widespread attention.

"[An] unnerving portrait of what it's like to work and live in a nursing home. . . . By giving voice to so many unheard residents and workers Diamond has performed an important service for us all."—Diane Cole, New York Newsday

"With Making Gray Gold , Timothy Diamond describes the commodification of long-term care in the most vivid representation in a decade of round-the-clock institutional life. . . . A personal addition to the troublingly impersonal national debate over healthcare reform."—Madonna Harrington Meyer, Contemporary Sociology

296 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1992

Reviews

[VIA · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book follows how nursing homes today are simultaneously arenas of caregiving and bureaucratic organizations founded on specific relations of power. It's a bit outdated (in a good way, there's improved and improving models of care for nursing homes, such as Continuing Care Facilities, PACE and HCBS programs from Medicaid, the Green House Project, etc.) However, the core is still important: Market improvement =/= well-being improvement. Good policy and business must consider the humanness of it all.

It's funny that it took me so long to finish this book. It's actually quite short, but it kept going on the back burner.

[Brandy]

Other than the last two chapters which I thought were overly repetitive, this was a really good book. A white, male sociology professor specializing in health care decides to become a certified nursing assistant and work in 3 different Chicago nursing homes. He mixes narratives of what he witnessed while he was there with analysis from a sociological perspective and then ends the book with ideas for improvements to nursing home care. I learned a lot from this book, the most hard hitting being 1) how common it is for old people to run through their money and end up on medicaid and 2) how rigid of a schedule most nursing homes operate on due to the business model of health care 3) just how dis-empowered and passive a lot of old people are made to feel under the current business model of nursing home care. Inspired to do better in my career!

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting read, though he seemed to rehash the same points over and over again. Interesting how even though it is slightly dated, some of the issues brought up in the book are still present in many nursing homes that I have visited.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

read for a class and so happy i did