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Called to Care?
Health Care Work, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work
Cindy L. Cain
Rutgers University Press, 2026

Health care workers are burned out. Health care leaders know that workers are burned out, but do not yet have the right tools to fix the problem. Called to Care? argues that we can mitigate burnout by examining what is most meaningful about health care work. Using interviews and observation of a wide range of health care workers, Cain shows that workers who care for our most vulnerable adults find their work to be meaningful when they are able to connect to the work and make progress on something that matters. In most cases, these meaningful experiences are also consistent with better care for patients. And yet organizational practices, policy environments, and cultural meanings get in the way of meaningful work, creating burnout. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Called to Care? illustrates that workplaces can and should align meaningful work experiences with quality care for patients.

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front cover of From Crisis to Catastrophe
From Crisis to Catastrophe
Care, COVID, and Pathways to Change
Mignon Duffy
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The COVID pandemic has shaken the material and social foundations of the world more than any event in recent history and has highlighted and exacerbated a longstanding crisis of care. While these challenges may be freshly visible to the public, they are not new. Over the last three decades, a growing body of care scholarship has documented the inadequacy of the social organization of care around the world, and the effect of the devaluation of care on workers, families, and communities. In this volume, a diverse group of care scholars bring their expertise to bear on this recent crisis. In doing so, they consider the ways in which the existing social organization of care in different countries around the globe amplified or mitigated the impact of COVID. They also explore the global pandemic's impact on the conditions of care and  its role in exacerbating deeply rooted gender, race, migration, disability, and other forms of inequality.
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