Essential Guide to Acute Care

What you really need to know, but no one told you.

The Essential Guide to Acute Care contains everything you really need to know about acute care that you can’t find in a standard textbook and have probably never been taught before.

Starting with the concept of patients at risk, the Essential Guide to Acute Care explains how to recognise and manage the generic altered physiology that accompanies acute illness.

The principles of acute care are explained simply yet comprehensively. Throughout the book ‘mini-tutorials’ expand on the latest thinking or controversies, and practical case histories reinforce learning at the end of each chapter. The chapters are designed to be read by individuals or used for group tutorials in acute care.

Extensively rewritten and updated, this second edition is essential reading for anyone who looks after acutely ill adults, including:

• 
  
• Foundation Programme trainees and trainers
  
• Trainees in medicine, surgery, anaesthesia and emergency medicine
  
• Final year medical students
  
• Nursing staff and allied professionals working in critical care

Forewrod.

Introduction.

Acknowledgements.

Units used in this book.

1 Patients at risk.

2 Oxygen therapy.

3 Acid-base balance.

4 Respiratory failure.

5 Fluid balance and volume resuscitation.

6 Sepsis.

7 Acute renal failure.

8 Brain failure.

9 Optimising patients before surgery.

10 Pain control and sedation.

Appendix - Practical procedures.

Index

"This book is for trainees who regularly come into contact with acutely ill adults. By explaining the physiological changes it aims to provide a logical basis for management and optimal care. To provide a book that will be useful to a range of grades from a variety of disciplines is certainly a challenge. However I think this book succeeds admirably. It really does provide a lot of information that you really want to know and understand and which is not available in the standard texts...I think this is an excellent book which I would certainly recommend to all grades - as a learning tool for trainees and as a refresher to senior staff." Clinical Tutor and Foundation Programme Director, Cheltenham General Hospital Dr Nicola Cooper, MRCP, Specialist Registrar in General Internal Medicine and Care of the Elderly, Yorkshire, UK

Dr Kirsty Forrest, FRCA, Consultant in Anaesthesia, The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Yorkshire, UK

Dr Paul Cramp, MRCP FRCA, Consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Yorkshire, UK

The principles of acute care are explained simply yet comprehensively. Throughout the book ‘mini-tutorials’ expand on the latest thinking or controversies, and practical case histories reinforce learning at the end of each chapter. The chapters are designed to be read by individuals or used for group tutorials in acute care.

Extensively rewritten and updated, this second edition is essential reading for anyone who looks after acutely ill adults, including:

• 
  
• Foundation Programme trainees and trainers
  
• Trainees in medicine, surgery, anaesthesia and emergency medicine
  
• Final year medical students
  
• Nursing staff and allied professionals working in critical care