Amazon.com: Fundamentals of Nursing: Collaborating for Optimal Health (9780838525944): Karen J. Berger, Marilyn Brinkman Williams: Books

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0838525946 | ISBN-13: 978-0838525944 | Publication Date: September 23, 1998 | Edition: 2

Grossmont College, El Cajon, CA. Introductory text for students to the art and skills essential to professional collaboration. Vol.1: Nursing, Health and the Patient; Vol.2: Nursing Collaboration and Health Care; and Vol.3: Nursing Assessment and Management. Four-color layout, collaborative strategies, and insights from nursing literature are included. DNLM: Nursing Care.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } Grossmont College, El Cajon, CA. Introductory text for students to the art and skills essential to professional collaboration. Vol.1: Nursing, Health and the Patient; Vol.2: Nursing Collaboration and Health Care; and Vol.3: Nursing Assessment and Management. Four-color layout, collaborative strategies, and insights from nursing literature are included. DNLM: Nursing Care.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Key Benefit: The second edition of this excellent nursing text has been completely revised . The book has been streamlined to focus on the fundamentals that students need to know for successful nursing practice. Key Topics: The book begins with an overview of the nurse and the nursing profession, focusing on the roles, functions, and professional responsibilities of the nurse. Other topics covered include health and illness, nurse-client collaboration, fundamental nursing assessment and management, and nursing and health care as a business. Each chapter includes chapter key vocabulary terms, behavioral objectives, chapter summaries, illustrated procedure tables and boxes, and sample assessment questions. Market: Undergraduate nursing students.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

A new millenium inspires hope that humankind at last will meet one of its major challenges—that of assuring access to affordable health care for every individual. As reforms emerge, nursing's role will be a central one in shaping the policies, structures, and practices to advance access as a national objective. Indeed, nursing's participation in the policy initiatives of the 1990s, grounded on its own national reform agenda, amply demonstrates the profession's commitment to health care as a human right, and calls attention to nursing's readiness to provide cost-effective services to a diverse population seeking health information and choice.

Looking forward, the theme of this text—collaboration for optimal health—is as relevant as when the first edition appeared. The rapid expansion of managed care, to date the major trend in health care reform, makes it so. Managed care, while on the one hand fostering interdisciplinary professional collaboration with its pressures for cost-containment, also brings economic constraints to bear on patient-provider collaboration, often with controversial results. Although the years ahead will determine whether managed care will curtail health care costs over the long term, public concern is now growing over the role of third-party insurers, and how seriously their intervention will erode the foundation on which patient-provider collaboration is based. As the issues in this dilemma are sorted out, consumerism in health care, which manifests the popular demand for choice and participation in decision making, will continue as a powerful movement and an important societal trend.

Approach

The collaborative philosophy, which provides a necessary foundation for nursing practice, remains a key feature of our approach and the theme of this edition. Nurses' ability to initiate and influence reforms will to a large extent depend on the strength and quality of their transactions in an increasingly complex and volatile environment. Those transactions will be enhanced by collaboration, which emphasizes the importance of working together with others, using persuasion based on knowledge and reason to attain mutually beneficial, socially important goals.

A philosophy of collaboration is valuable, because it provides an action-oriented framework within which nurses can realize their professional values. Nursing has long recognized that our multicultural society, characterized by population diversity and subgroup value differences, embraces a variety of paradigms on health and illness, paradigms which may have critical implications for care. A philosophy of collaboration is uniquely sensitive to human differences. It assumes that patients will bring their divergent points of view to the encounters they have with health care professionals, which are important points to address in the context of the helping relationship. Indeed, doing so fosters patient dignity and self-determination, hallmarks of caring and central values of the nursing profession.

The environment of health care continues to grow more challenging day by day which means that nursing education will be under constant pressure to align its curricula with the driving forces of change. As a new era opens, the fast-paced scientific advances and ever-changing technology of the 20th Century will persist as important characteristics of the health care environment, as will the provider specialization they promote, delivery system reforms notwithstanding. Although this triad is responsible for much of the service quality improvement of the past, it is also a factor in the spiraling cost increases that make access a problem for so many citizens. Thus, continued pressure for economy is a certainty as the nation's population grows and ages, and its demand for expensive services increases.

In light of that reality, it is important to initiate today's fundamentals students to an economic perspective on practice. This text, along the lines of the first edition, introduces readers to the essentials of health care economics within a collaborative framework that can be applied at the bedside or in the conference room.

Finally, as scarce health care resources are spread ever-more thinly, at least some social turbulence is likely. The changes ahead are certain to bring conflict as competing interests collide. Consequently, the nurses of the future will be called on to engage in political bridge-building, asserting their positions while they negotiate, lobby, and ultimately compromise on policies and plans that acknowledge others' positions yet preserve their own values and ideals. This text introduces students to the art and skills essential to professional collaboration.

Content and Organization

Aware of the burdens on today's students, we have revised our text to consolidate its content while still retaining comprehensive discussions of the subjects necessary to prepare students for the challenges ahead. It is important to note that we have not sacrificed essential information, but rather achieved a substantial reduction by paring repetition and merging material related in subject matter. For example, chapters on the nurse and the nursing profession, on family and community nursing, and on health care economics and delivery, have been combined to produce integrated presentations more efficient in their development of material. The content on some concepts (for example, pain and pain management or the self as an aspect of individual personality) has been pulled together to unify the presentation and make content location easier.

A brand new feature of this edition is that our reduced and reorganized content is now divided into three portable volumes which can be used in various ways to support the fundamentals curriculum.

Volume 1, Nursing, Health, and the Patient, introduces readers to material often presented early in the fundamentals curriculum. Nursing's history, the contemporary roles and functions of the nurse, legal aspects of nursing, health and illness, stress and adaptation, community and family health, cultural and individual dimensions of nursing, are some of the chapters.
Volume 11, Nursing Collaboration and Health Care, examines the structure and process of nursing practice from a collaborative perspective. Chapters focus on patient-centered communication and the helping relationship, teaching and learning, professional decision making and the nursing process, interdisciplinary teamwork, and trends in health care economics and delivery.
Volume Ill, Nursing Assessment and Management, addresses clinical nursing from a framework of ten functional dimensions of health, including three not found in many fundamentals texts: Wellness and Well-being, Self-expression, and Neurosensory Integration. Each chapter defines and develops content related to a single dimension according to the phases of the nursing process, and offers extensive guidelines for collaborative health assessment and nurse-patient management.

The strong emphasis on nursing diagnosis remains in this edition, however, the management sections of Volume III, where material is again organized around the continuum of care, contain not only fully updated content, but also important new elements:

Home health care discussions depict not only the nurse's role in the home but also specific challenges that nurses face in preventing illness and promoting health in the home.
Home health adaptations for every nursing procedure help the reader understand how to apply and modify nursing procedures when practicing in the home.
Critical pathways related to every functional dimension showing collaborative care plans for practice in acute and home care settings are time-sequenced, outcome-driven plans illustrating the expected nursing actions and schedule of progress for patients undergoing either a complex surgical procedure or an acute episode of a chronic, debilitating medical condition.

Other New and Noteworthy Features

Other important features include:

An extravagant four-color art layout, including a new set of photos along with revised and up-dated line drawings for every chapter.
An emphasis on critical thinking complete with thought-stimulating "Critical Queries" designed to engage the reader in applying chapter content. In many cases, these are derived from summaries of cutting-edge nursing journal articles, summarized in "Insights from Nursing Literature," both presented within close proximity of each other. Clinical situations posed in chapter openers promote critical thinking as students apply chapter content to understand the scenario and the nurse's role.
"Collaborative Strategies" weave the collaborative theme throughout the text and highlight important principles and action ideas that support nurses' collaborative role.
Alphabetical skills and concept directories and other user-friendly features were designed to make the three-volume text easy to use.
New content has been added to every chapter. New CDC and HICPAC Guidelines on infection control are presented and integrated into nursing procedures. The computer chapter contains a detailed section on the Internet as a vital nursing resource.
The instructors manual has been upgraded with text feature directories organized by chapter to help instructors create lesson plans. The manual also includes new exercises to promote critical thinking in the classroom and laboratory, and a new listing of media resources for today's nursing media labs.

Overall, reorganization and content changes make this edition particularly user-friendly. Many first-edition features remain, how ever, to maximize the value of the text as a tool for instruction and learning. Some of them are:

A noticeable lack of paternalistic language and ideology in depicting nurses' role while not losing sight of nurses' essential responsibilities in c... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.