Intensifying Care

"Intensifying Care" contributes to overcoming this disparity by focusing on nurses and the reorganization of the nursing labor process during the cost containment era. In the expansionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s, nursing labor in hospitals was organized around a stratified work force performing differentiated tasks. Beginning in the 1970s, this system of labor was transformed by a trend toward RN-predominant staffing, the displacement of less-credentialed workers, and the reunification of nursing tasks. Nursing leaders promoted task reunification as a form of professional practice reminiscent of nursing before the widespread employment of a stratified work force in postwar hospitals.