Summary- Thinking as a Nurse
Summary- Thinking as a Nurse
Bruce Austin Scott completed his B.S.N and M.S.N at University of Alabama in Huntsville and University of Texas in Austin respectively. He has over twenty-five years of teaching experience and over thirty-seven years’ experience of patient care. Before writing this book, Bruce Austin has written many articles for famous publications as well. All these statements prove Bruce’s expertise and wisdom. He has all the necessary skills, information, experience, and knowledge required to write a book.
Evaluating the expertise of an author is one of the most appropriate ways to judge the book content. A book written by a knowledgeable and experienced author of the respective profession will contain nothing but truth. One can blindly trust its content and look forward to it in any phase of life. Therefore, the book “Thinking as a Nurse” is also a reliable book containing authentic information.
The book includes all the technical and non-technical factors of nursing, i.e. cerebral, and cognitive aspects. The main objective of Bruce was to enable readers identify a patient’s problem and find its appropriate solution. Most importantly, he aimed to deliver his knowledge about characteristics of nursing, distraction of technical skills, and impediment of memorization to his readers . Some of the topics discussed in the book include empathy, nurse-physician relationships, and pathophysiology .
Bruce succeeds in achieving his goal, as the readers especially students gain a lot of knowledge about clinical practices. They learnt how to communicate effectively with their patients by listening to their problems and understanding it clearly. In this way, the book also accomplishes its goal of sharing knowledge.
Bruce has used examples from real life to emphasize on his point. He also shares his experiences and relates it to the topic so that the concept is clear to readers. For instance in his chapter about “Professionalism, a way of life”, Bruce tells about an interview which he asks from most of the students. He says he always asks the students why they want to be nurse. Of all the different answers, the most disappointing one was becoming a nurse for fun . Here, Bruce tries to change the mind of such students by emphasizing the importance of professionalism and seriousness in nursing. The patients look forward to nurses and they should never consider their profession a means of fun. In fact, nurses should devote their lives for patient care.
The books include all the important topics covered. However, the book is very short, and the author could not explain each of its topics in great depth. Some topics like pathophysiology should have been discussed in detail so that the novice member to this profession could also understand it very easily. In this way, by adding few more pages to the book, Bruce could have made his points more clear. Moreover, the inclusion of some pictures and illustrated examples could have been a better approach.
In my opinion, there is no topic that is left out in the book. However, I did mention some details are missing but the entire topic is not. As the book only aims to deliver knowledge to at basic level, I believe the topics covered are enough. While reading the chapter about smartness of teamwork, I could constantly link my practical life with it. I realized the importance working as a team in this profession.
References
Scott, B. A. (2009). Thinking as a Nurse. Bloomington: iUniverse.
