Professing to be neutral is belied by his targets and conclusions while the arguments are certainly compelling and well thought out.

This is a highly charged area because it gets into the major issues of the day while looking at political divides. He carefully introduces what has been learned and through what methods, introduces the problem, then proposes solutions. The second half of the book is devoted to taking those lessons to the political realm, and Link does that in the same orderly manner. Link shows how looking at a problem from every angle, not missing even a small detail, can be the difference between life and death, or success or failure in other aspects in our lives. These can be micro, such as a malfunctioning cardiac alarm and how it effects care, or macro, like rebooting an organizational schematic for all hospital personnel.

He shows the reader how doctors and hospitals take adverse and positive incidents and examine, deconstruct, reexamine, re-deconstruct and then reevaluate them to pinpoint areas needing improvement. Link’s goal is to take those medical, moral, organizational and leadership lessons and apply them to local, national and international politics. The stories of how teams at Bellevue and the New York hospital system pulled together, came up with creative solutions on the fly and sacrificed their own well-being for others is inspirational and instructive. For example, the chapters on how the hospital survived Hurricane Sandy and the response to the current Covid situation are interesting and hold valuable lessons for us all. These lessons, along with various aspects of leadership, are laid out in chapters that are detailed and written in manner anyone can understand. Each incident is carefully chosen for a specific purpose in the second half of the book but also are valuable by themselves. builds his foundation of recommendations for fixing a “sick nation” on organizational and diagnostic lessons from over a half-century in the medical field at Bellevue Hospital, one of the premier “safety net” hospitals in the U.S. Ailing Nation is certainly a fascinating book and well worth reading one that has a number of moving parts that are instructive and should be taken to heart.

The Ailing Nation by Nate Link