Description
Are you a starting work in critical care? Are you an experienced nurse but need to check guidelines and best practices?
This is the indispensable guide to daily procedures and problems faced by nurses working in this specialty.
This book will help you to
- Organise your job and yourself
- Assess patients and communicate with them
- Get clinical information on a wide range of conditions
- What to do in emergency
This UPDATED edition:
- Completely updated and revised content written by authors with extensive nursing experience in the field
- Physiological, psychological and social areas, as well as legal issues, ethical and moral dilemmas that critical care nurses and health care practitioners may face on a daily basis
- Boxes, tips and diagrams to help bridge the theory-practice gap while embarking on your critical care career.
Part of the A Nurse’s Survival Guide series
Completely updated and revised content written by authors with extensive nursing experience in the field
Physiological, psychological and social areas, as well as legal issues, ethical and moral dilemmas that critical care nurses and health care practitioners may face on a daily basis
Boxes, tips and diagrams to help bridge the theory-practice gap while embarking on your critical care career.
Table of Contents
Section 1 - General principles of critical care
1.1: Introduction to critical care nursing
1.2: Health and Safety
1.3: Emergencies and life-threatening conditions
1.4: Life threatening complications/ outcomes
Section 2 - Patient assessment and investigations
2.1: Identification of patient needs/problems
2.2: Assessment
2.3: Haemodynamic monitoring
2.4: Diagnostic procedures
Section 3 - Critical care interventions
3.1: Medium-technology life-support interventions
3.2: High-technology life-support interventions
3.3: Caring for a critical care patient
3.4: Intubation and ventilation
3.5: Transfer of critical care patients
Section 4 - Common conditions/reasons for admission
4.1: Physiological processes common to all medical and surgical conditions
4.2: Neurological
4.3: Endocrine disorders
4.4: Respiratory
4.5: Cardiovascular
4.6: Renal
4.7: Gastrointestinal (GIT)
4.8: Immunological
4.9: Burns
4.10: Poisoning/overdose
Section 5 - Psychological and ethical care
5.1: Mental effects of critical care
5.2: Death and dying in critical care
5.3: Professional practice issues
Section 6 - Pharmacology
6.1: Medication management
6.2: Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics
6.3: Classification of drugs used in critical care
6.4: Drug calculations
6.5: Nurse prescribing
References
Further Reading
Appendix 1 Units of measurement
Appendix 2 Normal values
Appendix 3 Drug measurement and calculations
Glossary
Index
