“The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it's not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring.”

“I have never had a problem or a worry, either big or small, that couldn’t be made better by meeting with a girlfriend and talking about it over coffee. If only world leaders could do the same, I’m certain wars could be averted.”

“She was a woman who conquered herself so that she could serve others.”

“The English, who look on stoically as national health hospitals in run-down metropolitan areas close their wards through lack of support and patients spend time on trolleys in corridors, are comforted by the knowledge that wounded hedgehogs are tenderly cared for in a hedgehog hospital.”

“Nurses never tell you what they know. They’re hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.”

“So Medicare decided to pay hospitals like ours for internship andresidency training programs, get it? It’s a win-win, as they say—the hospitalgets patients cared for by interns and residents around the clock,people like us who live on site, and whose stipend is a bloody fraction of what the hospital would pay full-time physicians. And Medicare delivers health care to the poor.”

“There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.”