Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I love this textbook! I have only one quarter left until I graduate with an associate's degree in nursing and I needed a textbook that would help me start thinking like a nurse and not just a student trying to pass a test. At my college we used a different textbook that I found confusing and unhelpful. I really wanted and needed a textbook that would help me develop critical thinking skills, not just skills to answer NCLEX-style questions.
Here is what I like about this textbook:
1. There aren't alot of fussy break-out boxes and tables that clutter up the pages. I get distracted very easily, and if there are alot of tables on a page, it is hard for me to stay focused on the text. This book does have tables, boxes and illustrations, but they are simple and easy to comprehend. I found with the other textbook I would get overwhelmed with all the detail and anxious about trying to memorize everything. I feel alot better with this textbook, because it seems to get you focused on what you need to know to practice nursing.
2.The text of this book seems to go from general principals to more specific. For example, the general assessment, pre-op and post op care, and diagnostic tests are described for a body system before the book gets into the specific details of various conditions are discussed. This has helped me to get a big picture and see commonalities for the nursing care before getting into finer details that are disease and condition specific.
3. This textbook give a lot of valuable information. It does try to give the rationales to help you understand why you are doing something. For example, a sign and symptom of hyperkalemia is oliguria or anuria. But, this books goes further to state that oliguria and anuria are often precursors to hyperkalemia and not a result of hyperkalemia. If your kidney can't make urine to excrete potassium, you will get a build up of potassium in the system. This kind of explanation helped me to easily understand and memorize the symptoms of hyperkalemia. I like having the reason described so that I am not left to just memorize without understanding.
4. This textbook also tries to teach you how to delegate to nursing assistants. Before I bought the textbook, I went to the publisher's website and they had a web page devoted to advertising this book. There, the author described that they also looked at how nurses are more and more being pulled into court to defend their nursing care. They looked at areas where nurses are most often involved in litigation, and tried to include teaching about these areas to help furture nurses not get pulled into court. So, throughout the book are boxes that describe delegation issues to help you know what you can and cannot delegate, and what instruction you need to give to people you delegate a task.
5. THis book has critical thinking exercises at the end of most of the chapters. Just doing a few of these exercises has already helped me feel more confident about what I need to do as a nurse with patients in my care. My problem with my other textbook was it just had a few NCLEX questions at the end of a chapter. But, my anxiety was that when you have a real patient, you're not going to be given a list of four things to choose from like you will on a NCLEX test. This textbook has a companion cd and a website where you can go to find a discussion of the critical thinking exercises so you are not left hanging wondering if you came up with a good answer.
Lastly, this textbook comes in a 2-volume set, and I would recommend getting that instead of the single volume. It is a HUGE book, so it is nice to have it broken down into 2 smaller texts that are a more manageable size.
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