Intensive Care for Nurses [antikvár]

Preface to the First Edition Stimulated by the development of open heart surgery, intensive care in Birmingham began in a converted examination room containing two standard hospital beds. Monitoring equipment was improvised in the research laboratories or adapted from standard apparatus. From these small beginnings has evolved the chain of intensive care units now functioning in the hospitals of the Birmingham teaching group; each caters for different aspects of the care of the seriously ill patient, but all have a superb standard of nursing care in common. If credit for this development is to be given to any one person, it must surely be to the late Sister Marion Simpson through whose energy and devotion intensive care nursing here was nurtured in those early days, to become the respected specialty of nursing which it is today. She compiled a loose-leaf folder describing standard procedures which has been distributed to many centres in this country; this still forms the basic text used in our training course. This book is dedicated to Sister Simpson. The editors are conscious that criticism may be justly levelled at a multiple-author book for nurses written entirely by doctors. The omission of a nursing contributor is no slight to that profession; it is indeed a tribute to the unique status of the intensive care nurse. It is assumed that the reader is well grounded in standard nursing techniques. She now moves into the hinterland between the medical and nursing professions where she will be required to exercise a degree of initiative and accept a measure of responsibility which is often greater than that expected of a newly qualified doctor. This must be rooted in an understanding of medicine, surgery and physiology which can best be explained by a specialist in those fields. No single contributor could have written the whole of this book; it is our hope that, together, we