About
Suzanne Gordon is an American journalist and author who writes about healthcare delivery and health care systems and patient safety and nursing. Gordon coined the term "Team Intelligence," to describe the constellation of skills and knowledge needed to build the kind of teams upon which patient safety depends. Her work includes, First Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems of Patient Safety (Cornell University Press, 2012), a collection of essays edited with Ross Koppel and Beyond the Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Safety and Teamwork (Cornell University Press, 2012), written with commercial pilot Patrick Mendenhall and medical educator Bonnie Blair O’Connor, with a foreword by Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger.It also includes books about nursing's contribution to health care including Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines, and Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care. With Bernice Buresh, she is author of From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public, which is in its third edition. Along with Sioban Nelson, she co-edits The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work Series at Cornell University Press.She is author, co-author or editor of 18 books. She is currently working on a book about the innovations and clinical care at the Veterans Health Administration. Gordon is co-author of the play about team relationships in healthcare entitled Bedside Manners. This play has been performed at numerous venues including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, The National Patient Safety Foundation, and is being used in Interprofessional Education programs in the US and Canada, including the University of Toronto and The University of California at San Francisco, Yale University, and many others.Gordon has been a radio commentator for US CBS Radio and National Public Radio's Marketplace. She is a certified TeamSTEPPS Master Trainer. Gordon has lectured all over the world on healthcare issues. She is assistant adjunct professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Nursing. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Wilson Centre at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine. and an editorial board member of the Journal of Interprofessional Care.