ENVIRONMENT OF CARE

A hospital engineer keeps a chaotic workplace functioning in Clear’s debut novel.

Phil Stewart is the chief engineer at a hospital that seems to be falling apart. There are plumbing issues, mysterious power outages, and skyrocketing renovation costs, among other issues. Phil solves a series of problems, often fighting against the opposition of the nursing staff. He also has an ailing mother who lives far away, so he moves her to a nursing home closer to his house so he can better see to her care. A new administrator shakes things up at the hospital, and Phil’s biggest source of anguish are the policies of the corporation that owns the facility, which often contradict what’s best for the patients. The hospital also gets hit with Covid-19, and Phil has to deal with an aging workforce at risk and his suspicion that some of the staff don’t know how to operate the equipment he’s responsible for maintaining. He starts to believe that the technology that’s made the staff’s lives easier is also making them less competent, because machines are doing most of their work for them. When Phil’s mother is admitted to a different hospital, he finds it hard to trust those caring for her. As the novel progresses, there are several scenes of long administrative meetings that bog down the proceedings with excessive detail that may not be of much interest to readers who aren’t hospital administrators themselves; for example, there are several scenes just about upgrading hardware in the mental health unit. That said, the sections in which Phil works out solutions to the issues that face him are often engaging. The fact that these moments sit side by side with scenes detailing administrative conferences about body wipes and parking spaces, however, makes the book read more like a hospital-engineering troubleshooting manual than a novel, at times.

A sometimes-intriguing but longwinded look at day-to-day hospital life.