Pharmacology and the Nursing Process

• Focus on need-to-know information includes discussions of what nurses may encounter during drug administration in a variety of health care settings, providing accounts of real-life medication errors and tips for avoiding those errors.
• The Nursing Process is applied to each category of drugs, ensuring that you administer medications accurately and safely, and includes the steps of assessment, human need statements, planning, implementation, and evaluation.
• Emphasis on drug classes describes key similarities and differences among the drugs in each class, making it easier to understand how individual drugs work in the body.
• Consistent presentation for each drug group includes the mechanism of action, indications, contraindications, adverse effects, interactions, and dosages, concluding with drug profiles of individual drugs in the class or group.
• High-alert icons identify medications that pose a greater risk to patient safety.
• Focus on prioritization includes prioritized nursing diagnoses along with a corresponding prioritization of goals and outcomes, to help you learn to connect nursing diagnoses with goals and outcomes.
• Ease of readability makes difficult content more understandable.
• Photo atlas features more than 100 drawings and photographs showing drug administration techniques.
• Dosages tables summarize generic and trade names, pharmacologic class, normal dosage ranges, and indications for the drugs.
• Learning features at the beginning of each chapter include objectives and key terms, and at the end of each chapter, key points, critical thinking questions, review questions, and a list of resources available on the Evolve website.
• QSEN coverage includes the use of human need theory with human need statements, case studies featuring collaboration and teamwork content, Preventing Medication Errors boxes, and a discussion of the QSEN initiative as it relates to the safety and quality of patient care.

Undergraduate nursing students studying nursing pharmacology in BSN and higher-level ADN programs