Schuster, Pamela McHugh : Youngstown State University

Pamela McHugh Schuster, RN, PhD, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio

"Good fit for my course -- addresses every topic that I cover/emphasize with my students."

--Lynn Mitchell, BS Program, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Illinois

"Excellent book for use in Fundamentals. Helps the students put together the nursing process by focusing on important data."

--Linda McNeal, ARNP, MSN, Associate Degree Nursing Program, Florida Keys Community College, Key West, Florida

F.A. Davis Company Web Site, January, 2003

Concept maps help both educators and students to more clearly recognize patient needs, become quickly organized in thoughts and actions, and implement appropriate holistic care. They are practical, realistic and time-saving, reduce paperwork, and improve clinical performance. Concept Mapping: A Critical-Thinking Approach to Care Planning offers students a better way as they learn to synthesize pertinent assessment data into comprehensive concept maps, develop comprehensive care plans with nursing interventions that correspond to primary health problems, and effectively apply nursing care.


Key Features :

• Concept mapping promotes critical thinking and clinical reasoning by helping students to clearly visualize priorities and identify relationships in patient data when assessing patients' problems; the use of concept mapping allows the educator to quickly assess a student's critical thinking skills and progress
• Students follow these five steps in creating a concept map:
• Develop a skeleton diagram of the patient's health problems from the assessment data
• Analyze and categorize specific patient assessment data
• Indicate relationships between nursing and medical diagnoses
• Develop patient goals, outcomes, and nursing interventions for each nursing diagnosis
• Evaluate actual patient response to each nursing intervention and present clinical summary
• Four case scenarios are integrated within the text: three in-patient scenarios (perioperative, diabetic, and pneumonia); and one out-patient scenario (endoscopy)

1. 'Twas the Night Before Clinical ...
2. Gathering Clinical Data: The Framework for Concept Map Care Plans
3. Concept Mapping: Grouping Clinical Data in a Meaningful Manner
4. Nursing Interventions: So Many Problems, So Little Time
5. Nursing Implementation: Using Concept Map Care Plans in the Health-Care Agency
6. Mapping Psychosocial Problems
7. Concept Maps as the Basis for Documentation
8. When the Clinical Day is Over: Patient Evaluations and Self-Evaluations
Appendices: Nursing Diagnoses Arranged by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Nursing Diagnoses Arranged by Gordon's Functional Health Patterns
North American Nursing Diagnosis Association's Nursing Diagnosis Categories