Let’s have a good time! The Basic Nursing Manual celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.

comprehensive text that guides LPN/LVN nursing students through essential skills, procedures, concepts, and clinical applications. This engaging text, based on the NCLEX-PN framework, has been introducing critical pondering to nursing students for 50 years because of two authors, Caroline Rosdahl RN, BSN, MA and Mary Kowalski RN, BA, BSN, MSN. Both Rosdahl and Kowalski have made significant contributions to the nursing industry because the starting of their careers. They witnessed firsthand the event and evolution of nursing education and were in a position to translate these changes into meaningful educational tools for his or her readers.

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While Rosdahl was still in college, she was approached by someone who wanted to begin a nursing school and commenced describing behavioral goals for her. Rosdahl faced some opposition from her colleagues who believed that nursing was “too emotional and too psychological” to have goals, but she wrote them anyway. As people recognized her goals, she began receiving requests for curriculum, which led Lippincott to contact her in 1967 with a proposal to contribute to the second edition of the textbook, which now includes behavioral goals in every chapter. “I felt like I had something unique to offer that hadn’t been achieved before in nursing,” Rosdahl says. Kowalski joined the textbook as a consultant for its sixth edition, after which became a co-author of the eighth edition, which was published in 2002. She graduated from nursing school in 1975 and began as a nurse’s aide. When she returned to nursing school, she really enjoyed writing and reading, which translated into her work on the textbook. “I got to read all of the updated materials and enjoyed ensuring students had the data they needed. I even have been an instructor for 25 years and I actually enjoy working with nursing students,” says Kowalski.

“It’s amazing how much has changed” since she began writing for the textbook, Rosdahl says. “From government regulations to procedures and equipment,” he says, keeping the manual up thus far has been a challenge, but “it’s nice to see it in print and see people using it in practice.” To think that I’ve been working here this long is amazing.” Over the past 50 years, each Rosdahl and Kowalski have seen the nurse’s role and the technology they use evolve and turn out to be more complex to oversee. Rosdahl explains that the brand new challenge nurses face today is that “patients are sicker, there is so much more equipment, there are so many drugs and treatments that it’s not what it used to be.” If a patient is in hospital today, “their condition has to be really critical or they will be sent home, and a nurse is expected to be able to do all this while also requiring specialization. If you want to work in an intensive care unit, you will need additional training. I used to be able to swim and work anywhere in the hospital, but now a nurse can barely move from one ward to another. It’s much more complicated,” Kowalski recalls, when she started, “we didn’t have IV pumps that automatically counted the drops and sounded the alarm. You had to actually count the drops from the IV line to know they were being administered at the right rate. Otherwise, you will overfill the patient or give them too much or too little fluid.” When she began working in 1975, emergency departments were just starting to make use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and triage. “If you go to the ER now, these are the ones [nurses] they are actually trained to work in the emergency room as a specialty. There is a whole training shift happening now in critical care nursing.”

With all the brand new training initiatives and use of recent technology in nurse education, Kowalski insists that “machines break down and students don’t remember to check the machines.” You must calibrate your machines.” For example, inserting the improper size tube right into a machine could lead to the death of a patient. “We depend on machines, not real humans, but [patients] don’t press the call button because they want their machine to be adjusted. They press the call button because they want the person.” Rosdahl explains that when she began, nurses learned through clinical experience. They stayed within the hospital, caring for patients and learning on the job, “which admittedly was a bit haphazard,” but they gained experience working with patients. “Now a lot of education takes place in the laboratory through simulations. There are actually programs out there without any clinical experience, and that’s really scary to me because kids come out of them with no idea how to engage with a patient.” Nowadays, students enter the job market and experience “culture shock”. € where they are usually not used to working weekends, long shift hours and interacting with patients.
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One good change that has occurred, nevertheless, is that “there are tons of resources online that are great and helpful for students. But sometimes they’re not accurate and you have to be really careful with your sources, Rosdahl explains. We must “remind children that the Internet is not the Bible,” he emphasizes. Kowalski agrees and is concerned about “the amount of time students spend searching for information” on the Internet. “When we were making the book and the publishers told us, ‘let’s take this part out and put it on the Internet,’ I think there are still a lot of students who really need this book. But everything happens online, so [the editors and publishers] they need to determine where students will get their information, whether it be an online chapter or a regular book.” Regardless of where they decide to search for information, the source of the data remains to be most significant. Students may value authoritative and reliable resources corresponding to the Basic Nursing Manual

On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Rosdahl and Kowalski devoted special attention and time to the manual. Kowalski really likes Chapter 13, “Older Adults and Aging,” which discusses the concept of the aging process and the concept of adjusting the aging paradigm. “I had to research the definition of aging and discovered that there is no real definition,” she says. “Old age used to mean 65, but now 85 is really considered “older.” Because nurses are actually working beyond the age of 65 and a brand new generation of nurses is emerging, Chapter 13 discusses specific issues related to the aging nurse workforce. Rosdahl’s favorite a part of the textbook concerns psychiatry, which is her specialty. He can be glad that two or three editions ago the textbook began to incorporate colourful illustrations “that really make a difference”, together with teaching aids. Moreover, Rosdahl is happy that an Indonesian translation of the textbook is now available

The authors have some advice for novice nurses. Rosdahl advises that “all education is about learning how to learn. You can’t teach [students] all the material, so nurses need to know that they don’t know everything and need to use references, other nurses, and find out what they don’t know about a particular patient. They need to know what they don’t know.” Kowalski emphasizes that the primary yr of their profession is probably the most critical. “They must know they shall be scared to death. They do not know what to do and can claim they didn’t learn anything in nursing school, but things shall be quieter for them in the true world in the subsequent three months. Then, six months after graduation, they’ll think, “Oh, I can do it,” but they’ll turn out to be cocky. They start cutting corners and that is when probably the most mistakes occur – that is from the sixth month after graduation to the ninth month.” The last three months of your first yr, she says, are if you really understand what they’re doing as nurses

As Rosdahl and Kowalski concentrate on the subsequent 50 years, they see a shiny future for nursing. “We will employ more men in nursing,” Rosdahl predicts, “and with that the pay gap will grow.” She also believes that nursing will turn out to be more complex over time and “We’re going to need more nurses, we’re going to need more specialist nurses, and we’re going to need more nurses in the community. “Patients are sent home early and require care.” Kowalski predicts that there shall be more machines and computers in nursing than today. Information shall be more automated, he explains, and that that is “both good and bad.” Information is numbers that don’t indicate whether the patient’s condition has worsened. Nurses will proceed to wish to learn the way to interpret these numbers and machines to supply advantages to their patients.

To learn more about these authors, visit the web site Textbook of basic nursing.AND

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