Standard of Care: A Novel - Softcover

Kerns, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159181054X ISBN 13: 9781591810544

Publisher: Sentient Publications, 2007

Synopsis

A tale of ethical crisis and redemption, Standard of Care is one doctor's tumultuous journey as a senior executive in America's largest and most predatory hospital corporation. Weary of the tedium and diminishing returns of twenty-five years of private practice, Dr. Daniel Fazen becomes the new senior medical executive, the guardian of quality patient care, at Walnut Creek Memorial, his long-cherished community hospital. Without warning, eleven months later, Memorial is acquired by the Olympia Healthcare Corporation, the largest and, he knows, the most ruthless for-profit hospital conglomerate in America. At age fifty-five, with a taste for the good life and years of tuition ahead for his kids, Dan ponders a six figure incentive. With reservations-and rationalizations-he stays with Olympia. And so begins a downhill debacle...

About this title

From the Author:

Standard of Care is a medical drama of conscience, an exploration of the collision of the traditional healing values of doctors and nurses with the bottom-line demands of competition and survival in the era of corporate health care in America. As a pediatrician, medical professor, and long-time hospital administrator, I've applied my insider's knowledge and experience--along with a hefty helping of literary audacity--to write this story. Set in present-day Northern California, the novel traces the ethical journey of senior medical executive Dr. Daniel Fazen through his personal and professional struggle with the Olympia Healthcare Corporation, America's largest and most predatory for-profit hospital conglomerate. The specifics are fiction, but they are embedded in the clinical, legal, regulatory and business realities of American hospitals today. While the spine of the novel mainly inhabits hospital rooms, executive suites and Silicon Valley board rooms, there are also excursions to Paris, to Yosemite Valley, and to the protagonist's childhood in 1950's Chicago. There are many moments that are, I believe, thrilling, but Standard of Care is not a genre medical thriller, where doctor turns supersleuth to solve a murder or avert an epidemic. It is, rather, one man's journey of conscience in an expanding mega-industry pitting the health and lives of patients against profit. My highest hope is that the novel will do what fiction is supposed to do--immerse the reader in a compelling human story--and at the same time be provocative and educational about a growing crisis in our country.

About the Author:

David Kerns's career as a pediatrician has been largely devoted to the care of abused and neglected children. He is currently a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also the Medical Director for the Center for Child Protection, Department of Pediatrics, at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, where he has served over the years as Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics and Chief Medical Officer. In addition, he has been Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center. He was educated at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Northwestern University School of Medicine.

Dr. Kerns has published 35 academic journal articles as well as essays and book chapters in the field of pediatrics, and has co-authored a pediatric CD-ROM on child sexual abuse. Aside from writing and doctoring, he has occupied himself as a semi-pro musician, with incarnations as both a rock drummer and a bluegrass banjo player.

David Kerns lives in Oakland, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sentient Publications
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 159181054X
• ISBN 13: 9781591810544
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 229