LaTonya J. Trotter: More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State, 2020

The book sets out to discuss and analyse issues around professional identities for nursing practitioners (nP) in the context of their interchangeability to physicians and other nurse categories.The book delves into who the nurse practitioners believe themselves to be and how they come to that understanding as they navigate the Forest Grove elder services organisation and the expectations of federal state financing the organization.Additionally, the book explores issues of social work, gerontology, race, vulnerabilities and class at the intersection of social and clinical work.it highlights issues around health disparities related to class and race and how the needs of the ageing population can easily be obscured within the domain of medicine; how these needs through the process of medicalization can be obscured.Theoretically, the author engages Talcott Parsons' functionalist theory approach and, to some extent, a Marxist perspective on analysing how the nurses enact power at Grove through medicine and their clinic work; together with a structural pluralist approach looking at how the nursing practitioners secure influence within the organization.Despite the book's focus on nursing toward gerontological patients, the nPs and Rns (registered nurses) at Grove are general practitioners rather than certified gerontology specialists.The author has presented the needs of the people accessing services from the Grove having multiple health and social needs; which is in line with the expectations of geriatric patients globally (see Gray-Micelli et al 2014;Wold 2012;negrin et al 2022).The book examines both on the nPs' responsibilities towards the Grove organization; whether they meet the bottom-line of the organizational expectations and how they manage the needs of the Grove's patients.As Wilmoth and Ferraro (2007) point out in their book on gerontology perspectives, no single discipline can answer the core questions that gerontology entails, and therefore by extension, it can be argued that model of the RPs and nPs attempting to address the entire need system of the patients at Grove is not sustainable and shows the limits of the nursing profession as practiced within the organization.By explaining how the nPs at Grove increasingly are forced to address non-medical needs of the patients by redefining them to medical needs to make it easier for organizational purposes, the author conforms to the ideas of interactional medicalization in which case a physician or in this case nurses in interaction with patients redefine social problems into medical ones to meet the patients' needs (conrad 2007).The function of the nurses translating social needs of the patients into medical needs in order to organise and plan their work accordingly, further strengthens the position of nursing practiced through medical paternalism as espoused by Freidson (1986) in his conceptualisation of how medicine has professional dominance in defining and conceptualising problems and solutions to those problems in a complex setting.Freidson (1986) also notes that knowledge is often transformed as it moves from textbook to concrete application.To him, a profession can be transformed when it