Welcome to our readers, whether first-to-last pagers, skimmers, or wannabes! The MNA Commission on Nursing Practice and Education extends a warm invitation to join in engaging and enriching conversations with other MNA nurses. The MNA Ethics Book Club meets five times a year, and offers not only connection with other nurses, but also 2.0 nursing contact hours!
June and September book clubs will be held in person at the MNA Office. All the other book clubs will be held via Zoom (with all the bonus material it includes, such as pets, babies, and coffee mug wisdom). It’s an informal venue, yet often yields great insights for the time spent in discussion with one another.
Click on the links below or use the MNA event calendar at www.mnnurses.org/events to reserve your spot. You will receive a reminder email with the Zoom link prior to the Zoom book clubs. Hope to see you often in 2024! All book club meetings take place on Thursdays from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. (note new time) Any book club with low registration will be cancelled.
- Thursday, January 11, ONLINE: The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder by Charles Graeber (2013)
The Good Nurse provides a page-turning read with the pacing of a thriller and the literary depth of a novel. It does more than chronicle serial killing RN Charles Cullen’s life and deadly career, and the breathless efforts of two homicide detectives and Cullen’s best friend to stop him; it also paints an incredibly vivid portrait of friendship and betrayal, as well as a penetrating expose inside the corporate boardrooms of America’s private hospitals. - CANCELLED: Thursday, March 14 (2 books)
- The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson (2019)
Through the smallest of actions, nurses provide vital care and kindness. All of us will experience illness in our lifetime, and we will all depend on the support and dignity that nurses offer us; yet the women and men who form the vanguard of our health care remain unsung. In this age of fear, hate, and division, Christie Watson has written a book that reminds us of all that we share, and of the urgency of compassion - Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference by Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli (2019)
Compelling new research shows that health care is in the midst of a compassion. But the pivotal question is this: Does compassion really matter? In Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science – coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine – demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place.
- The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson (2019)
- Thursday, June 13, METRO: The Danger Within Us: America’s Untested, Unregulated Medical Device Industry and One Man’s Battle to Survive It by Jeanne Lenzer (2017)
Tens of millions of Americans have medical devices inside them, from pacemakers and artificial hips to cardiac stents and breast implants. But what do we really know about the companies that manufacture and sell these products? Lenzer presents an unsettling expose of the under-regulated medical device industry. She reveals the corruption, greed, and deceit that have combined to render medical interventions a leading cause of death in America. - Thursday, September 12, METRO: You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters by Kate Murphy (2020)
Despite living in a world where technology allows constant digital communication and opportunities to connect, it seems no one is really listening or even knows how. And it’s making us lonelier, more isolated, and less tolerant than ever before. A listener by trade,New York Times contributor Kate Murphy wanted to know how we got here. - Thursday, November 14, ONLINE: The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila (2023)
Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.