I read S.J. Rozan’s most recent novel in January and reviewed it here, where I said, and I quote myself without shame:

I do so love me an ending where maybe not everyone gets what they want but everyone who deserves it gets their due. A novel where you get a dozen plots for the price of one, told with style and substance and a fully-fleshed out backstory delivered with the subtlety of a truly professional storyteller.

Sometimes I ask authors whose work I love to write a little something about their novel for this space. Sometimes they say yes. S.J. said yes.

As I write this 15,000 nurses are on strike at the major NYC private hospital systems. Their demands are higher salary, health care
(!), and safe staffing (translating into a lower nurse/patient ratio). A looming nurses’ strike in NYC is one of the motivators of the action in my new novel, FIRST DO NO HARM. How did I know to be so prescient?

I didn’t, but I have a friend, a nurse, who was on the negotiating committee three years ago for the contract they now have. She gave me a password to watch the negotiations, something all the nurses had. I did watch, and my friend kept me informed on some behind-the-scenes action, too. What astounded me was management’s attitude: the negotiating lawyers could have been working for General Motors or General Mills, not General Hospital. Save management as much as possible, give labor as little as you can make it accept. The fact that “labor” was educated, trained staff making life and death decisions every day meant nothing. The fact that they were in the hospital through the pandemic — and sometimes died — while management worked remotely meant nothing. This was, merely, a labor negotiation.

I was appalled and fascinated. What else, then, could be going on in a large hospital that might be morally or legally suspect and had nothing to do with day-to-day patient care? That was where this book came from.

The contract that was being negotiated when I started thinking about this was a three-year deal. They finally settled — and now the contract’s up and the hospitals, crying poverty, are trying to cut the nurses’ benefits. So there’s a strike, again, just as my book is coming out. This isn’t prescience. It’s the inevitable result of health care being in the big-money corporate realm. Until we admit that General Hospital is not like General Motors, that nurses are desperately-needed professionals no less critical than doctors and certainly more valuable in urgent moments than management personnel, this cycle will continue.

#thiswritinglife Chatter First Do No Harm S.J. Rozan