Customer Reviews

Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I teach nursing, and this DAVIS Drug Guide for Nurses is a must-have for all my students as they learn how to professionally administer medications to their clients.
All nurses should have a convenient system to use when the occasion arises that a nurse gives a medication that they are unfamilair with...I found that this DAVIS Guide is a quick and easy way to investigate the medication, it's indications, contraindications, nursing considerations and idiosyncrasies. Adverse reactions and normal dosing ranges are included for all medications .....
There is also caution advised to prevent medication errors....near misses are always preferred over real errors any day. How the heart skips a beat whenever that happens!
Nurses NEVER intend to make errors, and this book gives a cautionary tale in the beginning - to help professionals understand the grave seriousness of it all.
It's never too late to buy an informative drug guide, and here I recommend this book to ALL --- professional or not.
It's cruicial that all people who give medications or take them understand the actions of the medications comprehensively.
The more one knows the more choices they posses.
Before you pass the meds,
pass the DAVIS Drug Guide!

My pharmacology class required Davis's Drug Guide For Nurses. Being a cynic, I checked out all the other guides available at the time. Davis's is the BEST drug guide for students, new grads and long-time nurses. Nursing dx are included with every drug listed. Quick and simple to use. Cross-referenced by brand and generic names. OTC medications get the same treatment as prescription medications. Davis's also has listings for the most used herbals and excellent content to help guide the nurse in herbal-drug interactions. The best deal out there, I am buying my third copy of this excellent resource.

I have found this to be the most useful drug book on the market. The doctors at the hospital prefer to use my Davis' over the PDR. It's a quicker to find the pertinant info on any type of dosage for every type of patient.

You can't go wrong with this fantastic drug guide! It is listed under generic names but if you don't know the generic name you can look up in the index at the back of the book for the trade name. I had a nurse/lawyer professor for my first year care plans and she wanted it all. This book delivered it ALL: classification, pregnancy catagory, indications, mechanism of action, contraindications and precautions, adverse reactions and side effects, interactions, route and dosage, availability, nursing implications and even potential nursing diagnoses! Also implementation, patient/family teaching and evaluation. Wow! I've been very impressed. It came through for me so I didn't have to go out and buy another drug book which is saying something! Davis's Drug Guide has even more in the back of the book with many appendixes including: recent drug approvals, additional drugs, combination drugs and opthalmic meds all that include class, indications, adverse reactions and side effects, route and dosage and contraindications and warnings. Appendix E is about natural/herbal products which is as thorough as the drugs that make up the main part of this book. There are pictures of the intramuscular drug sites, formulas helpful for calculating doses, routine pediatric and adult immunizations, recommendations for the safe handling of hazardous drugs, schedules of controlled substances, food sources for specific nutrients (ie foods rich in K, Na, Ca, Fe, vit K, vit D, low Na, foods that acidify urine as well as foods that alkalizine urine), and insulin and insulin therapy. Also throughout the book there is plenty of red lettering amidst the black for high alert warnings where drug overdoses have occurred in the past. The organized, easily found references in this guide could save your client's lives. Just because a doctor orders it doesn't mean it is ok to give, as a nurse we have to look it up and know the safe dose and contraindications and more and this book has it all! Highly recommended! Good luck all future nurses!
Soar!

The Kindle edition is incorrectly formatted and you cannot find the individual drug monographs via the Table of Contents. If you type in the generic name, you can get over a hundred items because all the cross references come up on the search.

I am an Instructor of initial Paramedic programs for East Carolina University in Greenville North Carolina. This is the best reference that I have found. This text contains information not found in many similar references such as the half life of a drug and duration of onset. This information is of particular interest to the Paramedic. The individual drugs are easy to locate and the language is precise and free of the useless clutter found in many drug references.

I work in ICU/CCU, and at times the ED. I especially like the syringe compability and IV compability guides. I have not found this information in other drug books for nurses. In an emergent situation, it is great to have one text which contains the information you NEED! Nurses in my unit will grab this book for reference (others are available), and so will the doctors. A Nurse Practioner referred this book to me, and I cannot thank her enough. I highly recommend Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses to all nurses, and student nurses. Paperback, 2002 edition review.

I am a 3rd semester nursing student and I absolutely love this drug guide. I have used others before, but this one is the best. It has the best IV drug administration info. It has side effects listed as the most life threatening in bold, and the most frequent in underlines. That makes it easy to wade through all of the possible side effects to the most likely and the most threatening that you may need to know for patient care and, of course, when getting quized by clinical instructors :) When my friends can't find a drug or a detail about administration they always ask for my book or my PDA (i have this version on my PDA also). This is the best drug book I have seen; it also has nursing diagnoses and great patient teaching instructions.

I recently purchased the Taber's 20th edition e-dictionary and was so happy with it that I decided to buy Davis's Drug Guide as well, thinking they would be similarly set up and easy to use. The drug guide is impossible to use on the Kindle. There is no way to search for a particular medicine. If you use the Kindle search feature, it will pull up every instance of that drug's mention from the beginning to the end of the book, in order only by page, not by relevance. The link that says "Drug monographs in alphabetical order by generic name" actually takes you to the "Medication Safety Tools link". It appears the index in the back of the actual book was actually removed from the Kindle version. The text goes from the last drug in the guide, to the appendixes and then to the bibliography. Fortunately, Amazon says they will honor returns on purchased e-books for 7 days. I'm getting my money back and I'll stick with my paperback copy. That's a shame -- this version could have been superbly useful for class and clinicals.

My single-star review is for the Kindle version only, I have found my paperback version to be invaluable.

I just downloaded a sample of the Kindle edition, and I do not recommend it for the following reasons. 1. It is the same price as the printed version except you don't get the additional materials on the CD with the Kindle version. Amazon should offer the Kindle version at a significantly lower price 2. The print on any tables is too small to read. 3. Searching it to quickly look up information about a drug is something that would take too long.