Dana Beth Weinberg
Assistant Professor

Office : Powdermaker Hall 252CC Telephone : (718) 997-2915 Fax : (718) 997-2820 Email : Dana.Weinberg@qc.cuny.edu

Dana Beth Weinberg, Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Queens College – City University of New York, received her doctorate in Sociology from Harvard University in 2000. Professor Weinberg formerly worked as a Survey Scientist at the Picker Institute, a non-profit organization known for its patient-centered care surveys. From 2002-2004, she worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Schneider Health Policy Institute, Brandeis University. Her research weds the studies of medical sociology and organizational behavior, a very powerful combination given the complexity of our medical system and its shortcomings in serving both its employees and its customers. Her work focuses on front-line employees' everyday work experiences and performance as these are shaped by organizational policies, practices, and culture. Her 2003 book Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing uses the case of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital to explore how hospital restructuring has contributed to the nation's nursing crisis. Recognizing the international importance of this story of how market-driven restructuring altered the culture and practice of nursing, the Japanese Nurses’ Association published a Japanese translation in 2004. Professor Weinberg has presented her research to lay, academic, and nursing groups across the country and has been active in the pursuit of safe nurse staffing ratios in the state of Massachusetts.

Professor Weinberg is finishing a study of work lives of nurses and nurses’ aides in nursing homes, with an eye toward understanding how to improve front-line jobs and in turn the care that residents receive. This work focuses on the importance of management philosophy for practices that empower front-line workers.

Professor Weinberg also has a long-standing interest in care coordination. She has been studying the effect of post-discharge coordination between care providers and patients and their informal caregivers (friends or family members) on patient recovery after surgery. A summary of some of her research is available from the Commonwealth Fund: http://www.cmwf.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=453771. She is currently researching the effects of nurses’ education on professional empowerment and inter-professional collaboration and the implications for patient-centered care.

Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing

Alternate Selection of the Nurse's Book Society

2003 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title

We are on the verge of the nation’s worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the quality of their nursing care, such as Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now struggle to fill vacant positions. What happened? Dana Beth Weinberg argues that hospital restructuring in the 1990s is to blame.

In their attempts to retain profit margins or even just to stay afloat, hospitals adopted a common set of practices to cut costs and increase revenues. Many strategies squeezed greater productivity out of nurses and other hospital workers. Nurses’ workloads increased to the point that even the most skilled nurses questioned whether they could provide minimal, safe care to patients. As hospitals hemorrhaged money, it seemed that no one—not hospital administrators, not doctors—felt they could afford to listen to nurses.

Through a careful look at the effects of the restructuring strategies chosen and implemented by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the author examines management’s efforts to balance service and survival. By showing the effects of hospital restructuring on nurses’ ability to plan, evaluate, and deliver excellent care, Weinberg provides a stinging indictment of standard industry practices that underestimate the contribution nurses make both to hospitals and to patient care.

For more information about Code Green, go to:

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3979