WCC Team Recommendations for Summer Reading

The WCC TAC Team has curated a list of books that we think would be perfect for your summer reading. Check out our recommendations below!

Reports Of Interest

• AFT Healthcare Staffing Shortage Task Force Report
• NAM National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being

• Pharmacy Workplace And Well-Being Report

On Moral Injury

• Caring for Caregivers to Be, edited by Jonathan Ripp, Larissa R. Thomas, and Dennis S. Charney
  • Caring for Caregivers to Be provides evidence-based insights and solutions to reduce burnout and improve well-being among medical learners, particularly students and graduate medical trainees. It provides a scoping review of the research related to the well-being of the health care learner and offers a suite of current and emerging tools and strategies believed to reduce medical burnout and foster resilience. Chapters identify the major drivers of both burnout and flourishing and explore the consequences of sub-optimal well-being for performance and patient care. The volume ends with practical considerations that medical education leaders can use for solutions-based well-being program development and tips for medical learners seeking to improve their own well-being within a professional environment. Caring for Caregivers to Be is the comprehensive guide to promoting the development of a resilient and professionally fulfilled physician workforce.
  • Order at Amazon, Oxford University Press
• If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicans to Put Patients First, by Wendy Dean
  • Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury – what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who’s fighting back against it. We need better healthcare—for patients and for the workforce. It’s time to act.
  • Order at Amazon, Penguin Random House
• Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, by Eyal Press
  • Illuminating th moving, sometimes harrowing stories of the people doing society's dirty work, and incisively examining the structures of power and complicitly that shape their lives, Press reveals fundamental truths about the moral dimensions of work and the hidden costs of inequality in America.
  • Order at Amazon, MacMillan Publishers

Understanding the U.S. Healthcare System

• The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander
  • By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed. 
  • Order on Amazon, MacMillan Publishers 
• An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenhall
  • The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
  • Order on Amazon, Penguin Random House
• Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the People Who Pay the Price, by Jonathan Cohn
  • America's health care system is unraveling, with millions of hard-working people unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Jonathan Cohn traveled across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee its citizens access to medical care—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans. Passionate, powerful, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick chronicles the decline of America's health care system, and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.
  • Order on Amazon, HarperCollins
• Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America, by Lawton Burns & David Dranove
  • In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised. This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.
  • Order on Amazon, UChicago