Medical-Surgical Nursing - E-Book

Book excerpt: Providing a solid foundation in medical-surgical nursing, Susan deWit’s Medical-Surgical Nursing: Concepts and Practice, 3rd Edition ensures you have the information you need to pass the NCLEX-PN® Examination and succeed in practice. Part of the popular LPN/LVN Threads series, this uniquely understandable, concise text builds on the fundamentals of nursing, covering roles, settings, and health care trends; all body systems and their disorders; emergency and disaster management; and mental health nursing. With updated content, chapter objectives, and review questions, this new edition relates national LPN/LVN standards to practice with its integration of QSEN competencies, hypertension, diabetes, and hypoglycemia. Concept Maps in the disorders chapters help you visualize difficult material, and illustrate how a disorder's multiple symptoms, treatments, and side effects relate to each other. Get Ready for the NCLEX® Examination! section includes Key Points that summarize chapter objectives, additional resources for further study, review questions for the NCLEX® Examination, and critical thinking questions. Nursing Care Plans with critical thinking questions provide a clinical scenario and demonstrate application of the nursing process with updated NANDA-I nursing diagnoses to individual patient problems. Anatomy and physiology content in each body system overview chapter provides basic information for understanding the body system and its disorders, and appears along with Focused Assessment boxes highlighting the key tasks of data collection for each body system. Assignment Considerations, discussed in Chapter 1 and highlighted in feature boxes, address situations in which the RN delegates tasks to the LPN/LVN, or the LPN/LVN assigns tasks to nurse assistants, per the individual state nurse practice act. Gerontologic nursing presented throughout in the context of specific disorders with Elder Care Points boxes that address the unique medical-surgical care issues that affect older adults. Safety Alert boxes call out specific dangers to patients and teach you to identify and implement safe clinical care. Evidence-based Practice icons highlight current references to research in nursing and medical practice. Patient Teaching boxes provide step-by-step instructions and guidelines for post-hospital care — and prepare you to educate patients on their health condition and recovery. Health Promotion boxes address wellness and disease prevention strategies that you can provide in patient teaching.