This book provides content required to deliver the best care for critically ill or injured children. It reflects the increasing acuity in all inpatient departments and the fact that these children are cared for in a variety of settings, including many specialty units in hospitals and in the emergency department, cath lab, diagnostic testing, and more. Pediatric acute and critical care nurses find themselves handling not only their patients, but care of their families and management of an interprofessional team of caregivers. With emphasis on evidence-based care and professionalism, this essential resource captures the professional role of the pediatric critical care nurse and the nurse’s contributions to the process of continuous quality improvement. The book comprises of ten chapters. Chapter one discusses caring for critically ill children and their families. Chapters two through nine are systems focused (pulmonary, cardiovascular, neurologic, renal, endocrine, gastrointestinal, hematologic, and immunologic systems). Each chapter reviews developmental anatomy and physiology, pathophysiology and defining characteristics of neonatal and pediatric disorders, clinical assessment, pharmacology, monitoring, diagnostic testing, pain and palliative care management, and a multidisciplinary approach to the plan of care. Each health problem is discussed along the continuum of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) Synergy Model for Patient Care and family-centered care with integration of ethical, legal, and environmental issues. Chapter ten discusses professional issues and includes content on quality, safety, communication, teamwork, work environment, and personal wellness.

This book makes a timely and essential contribution to professional training and is a welcome resource for those dedicated to improving long-term care services for older adults. It reflects the way society views the growing elderly population and the implications of this demographic trend for the field of long-term care. Long-term care continues to be the fastest growing segment of the healthcare industry; there is a critical need to educate and train a core of professional personnel with the knowledge and skills to address the complex issues in aging, health, and human services. The book aims to provide a useful reference of content information, effective practices, and model programs in elder care related to assisted living/residential care (AL/RC) administration. Similar to the first edition, this book is based on the core competencies required to operate assisted living communities. It contains five parts; each part focuses on a core competency in assisted living administration such as organizational management, human resources management, business and financial management, environmental management, and resident care management. The book embraces chapter features such as useful learning objectives, case studies, effective practices, and model programs in elder care that are relevant to assisted living communities. New chapters in this edition address topics such as inter-professional practice; home- and community-based services; information and communication technology; LGBTQ and other diverse groups; memory care; and palliative and hospice care. Importantly, the book is based on core competencies required to operate assisted living communities, and each of its five parts focuses on a core competency (i.e., domain of practice). The book serves as a useful reference for professionals who are associated with AL/RC organizations. It can also function as a primary textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in gerontology, health administration, and long-term care administration that focus on assisted living/residential care administration.

This book provides education, tools, and support for caregivers who care for high-risk maternal and neonatal patients so that they too can learn how to effectively and successfully provide high quality care coordination and family-centered care to patients and families in their daily care practice. It looks at the high-risk antepartum patient stay, the high-risk delivery, the NICU admission, the NICU journey, discharge home, special situations in the NICU, palliative and bereavement in the perinatal and neonatal period, and caring for the caregiver. Each chapter focuses on one of these areas and provides real examples of care situations, positive care coordination efforts, and exceptional psychosocial support that were provided to patients and families. One may even come across a few examples of where care coordination and psychosocial support did not go as well as it could have. Eighteen families have shared their very personal stories and experiences to increase the depth of the book and their words have not been altered. The book is intended primarily for the nursing and nurse practitioner audience. It is organized into six parts comprising 16 chapters. The first part presents an overview of nursing history, care coordination, and family-centered care. The second part discusses supporting patients in high-risk pregnancy and delivery. The third part deals with supporting patients and families in the NICU. The fourth part provides description on supporting patients with special challenges in the NICU. The fifth part talks about bereavement and palliative care support. The final part discusses therapeutic strategies for caregivers and patients.

This book is offered to hospice and palliative care nurses to assist their preparation for taking the Certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse (CHPN^®) certification examination. Interest in demonstrating expertise through certification as a hospice and palliative care nurse has continually grown, as recognition of one's expertise brings not only professional satisfaction but also personal pride. Since this text is a practice and certification review for hospice and palliative care nurses preparing for the CHPN certification examination, the book follows the test outline offered by the Hospice and Palliative Credentialing Center. In seven sections, the book offers tips on test-taking, an outline of the CHPN certification examination, a review of life-limiting conditions in adult patients, a review of pain and symptom management, a review of education and advocacy in patient and family care, a review of practice issues, and a full-length practice test with answers and rationales. It also presents practice questions at the end of the chapters. This must-have study guide for nurses seeking to obtain CHPN status provides state-of-the-art information about all aspects of this specialty. It features 300 carefully selected Q&As that offer a detailed rationale for each question, along with tips and strategies to promote exam mastery and frequently asked questions about the exam. Brief topical reviews address hospice and palliative care nursing practice in all of its dimensions, including physical, spiritual, and psychosocial. The resource highlights information that forms the basis of end-of-life care, such as communication and family-centered care. Additionally, the book covers high-level skills used by hospice and palliative care nurses, such as drug and dosage conversion and the use of infusion therapy.

The book examines various theories of aging including a contrast between the strengths-based person-in-environment theory and the pathologically based medical model of psychological problems. It advocates truly engaging with the older client during the assessment phase, and discusses a variety of intervention modalities. The book integrates an advanced clinical social work practice with in-depth knowledge of evidence-based practice as well as geriatric medicine, psychiatry and gerontology. The social worker must evaluate the status of the client’s housing, transportation, food, clothing, recreation opportunities, social supports, access to medical care, kinship and other factors considered important by the social worker or the client. Constructivist theory is a conceptual framework that is foundational to existential therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and narrative therapy, which are effective for older adults. Stigma associated with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation produce psychosocial stressors that converge on older clients. The book discusses several medical conditions affecting older adults such as Alzheimer’s disease, arthritic pain, diabetes and various types of cancers. Older adults may also suffer from substance abuse-related problems, hypersexuality, and various types of abuse such as neglect. The book also highlights the problems faced by the older adult LGBT community and those suffering from HIV disease. It ends with discussions on care and residential settings for the older adults, and palliative care and euthanasia.

This book presents a way of thinking about clinical inquiry, reasoning, judgment, and experiential learning in clinical practice. It illustrates the educational implications by providing a thick description of nurses’ thinking-in-action and reasoning-in-transition. The book provides a window to central areas of experiential learning required for the development of expertise in nursing practice. Throughout the book, numerous and varied suggestions and examples are provided to assist in the development of nurses toward expertise. Critical and acute care nursing practice is intellectually and emotionally challenging. The book describes two pervasive habits of thought and action in Chapters 2 and 3, clinical grasp and clinical forethought, and then nine domains of practice, in Chapters 4 through 12. While the fourth chapter provides a brief description of the clinical judgment and skillful interventions of excellent nurses as they manage the physiological functions of acutely and critically ill patients, the fifth illustrates how comforting patients forms a backdrop for clinical judgment. Encouraging family involvement in care-giving activities is an essential aspect of family care. Acute and critical care clinicians normally believe that patients who are dying should be admitted to palliative or hospice care. Chapter 11 describes the frontline system design and repair done daily by expert nurses, and chapter 12 presents a view of leadership based on directing and shaping excellent clinical practice. The last chapter presents pedagogical implications and uses of this work, both in schools of nursing and in practice settings.

By focusing on the individual professional in relation to team health and success, this book shows how to develop high-quality, high-performing palliative care teams. It explores the types of providers involved in palliative care, their roles, possible conflicts, and the opportunity to amplify their work as a team while overcoming the stigma that may be attached to palliative care. The book focuses on the foundational role of communication in leadership, team building, and the delivery of patient care. Palliative care continues to be a rapidly growing area of medicine. The book is designed to help us avoid common pitfalls while starting a team or correct issues in an already formed palliative care team. Unlike most books about palliative care, the book is geared toward equipping practicing healthcare professionals or soon-to-be-practicing students with practical solutions for working within complex, multifaceted palliative care teams. Departing from the traditional foci of provider–patient rapport and pain and symptom management, the book offers pragmatic solutions to common organizational headaches and unique palliative care team issues by helping practitioners consider the intricacies of interdisciplinary team dynamics, occupational culture, and self-care in emotional, labor–intensive positions. While this book will be especially attractive for the working palliative care professional, it will also be a useful socialization tool for medical and nursing schools, as well as graduate communication and social work programs and advanced undergraduate courses in health communication, nursing, and sociology. The text’s driving theme is an emphasis on the foundational nature of communication for individual and collective performance within palliative care teams. The authors frame communication as constitutive; in other words, our unique experience in our organization is based on how we approach communication in our interpersonal, group, and organizational relationships.

Caring for the dying and their families can be one of the most emotionally fulfilling, personalized, and loving acts a nurse can provide. This book, about the CARES tool, attempts to convey essential information on how to effectively care for the dying in a condensed and readily applicable format for the bedside nurse. It is divided into seven parts. A general background and the establishment of the CARES tool are found in Part I. The second part presents a detailed breakdown of the CARES tool by sections (comfort, airway, restlessness and delirium, emotional and spiritual support, and self-care). Part III shares the theoretical foundation of the CARES tool, and emphasizes the need for patient advocacy and strong communication skills. It also explores what can be done to promote a peaceful death. The fourth part consists of two chapters which address the changes in our culture that must occur and the new role of the doctor of nursing practice (DNP) for translating the current literature into evidence-based practice. Part V examines how the use of the CARES tool can impact nursing care and encourage end-of-life care involvement by other health care providers, and how hope can be nurtured for the dying. The penultimate part of the book provides insight into CARES tool application strategies employed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada. The last part summarizes the example scenario of an individual final journey and the individualized care he and his family were given in an effort to provide a peaceful and loving death. It also provides some recommended websites, readings, and references to continue the reader’s education on evidence-based compassionate care of the dying.

Nurse practitioners in the critical care environment deserve an authoritative resource for the care of critically ill patients, written by experts with diverse educational backgrounds and perspectives predominantly from within the discipline of nursing. The acute care nurse practitioner (ACNP) programs address the care of patients with urgent problems and those who may require hospitalization or other specialized care. This book contains the insights and first-hand experience of clinicians actively working in critical care, many of whom are considered experts on a national and international level. Significant emphasis is given to the complex pathophysiology and appropriate management of common problems encountered in the critical care environment, including trauma, infections, and disease. One chapter is also dedicated to the medical, legal, and ethical aspects of critical care. The book covers the role of the ACPN in acute and critical care, pulmonary management, cardiac concepts in acute care settings, liver, kidney, and kidney pancreas transplant management in the intensive care unit (ICU), burn management, multisystem organ failure, end-of-life and palliative care, and family-centered care.

This book distils the collective wisdom of foremost scholars and practitioners who together have nearly a millennium of experience in the death and dying movement. It bears witness to the evolution of the movement and presents the insights of its pioneers, eyewitnesses, and major contributors past and present. The authors intend the book for all who have been interested or actively engaged in the movement through the years, and especially for those relatively new to the field as students or practitioners who share these convictions and passions and will carry on, extend, and creatively transform the efforts discussed here. They trace the development of thanatology as an interdisciplinary field of study and organizational and practice developments in response to the diverse needs of dying, bereaved, suicidal, and traumatized individuals, families, and communities. Topics covered in the book include: hospice and palliative care, funeral practice, death education, and caring of the dying, suicidal, bereaved, and traumatized. A unique feature of the book is a detailed chronology that includes many, though of course not all, of the most important milestones of the last 60 years. It is intended to serve as an overview as well as the foundation for understanding this burgeoning field and as a guide for readers who wish to understand in detail its short, but rich, history.