Maternity, Newborn, and Women's Health Nursing: Comprehensive Care Across the Lifespan by Susan A Orshan

Product Details

Synopsis

This new book will be a core text for undergraduate Maternity/Newborn courses. It also will work for courses emphasizing Women's Health across the lifespan. Coverage includes core content on preconception, pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum. In addition, the text focuses on important topics throughout a woman's life: health promotion, nutrition, medical issues, psychosocial issues, sexuality, family, fertility control and issues, menopause, and aging. While other texts touch on the different stages of a woman's lifespan, this book provides more detail and information in areas outside the average maternity text.

"Doody's Core Titles™ 2009."

Annotation

This new book will be a core text for undergraduate Maternity/Newborn courses. It also will work for courses emphasizing Women's Health across the lifespan. Coverage includes core content on preconception, pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum. In addition, the text focuses on important topics throughout a woman's life: health promotion, nutrition, medical issues, psychosocial issues, sexuality, family, fertility control and issues, menopause, and aging. While other texts touch on the different stages of a woman's lifespan, this book provides more detail and information in areas outside the average maternity text.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer:Dotti C. James, PhD, RNC (Saint Louis University Doisy College of Health Sciences)
Description:This book approaches caring for women during all phases of their lives in the traditional format of pregnancy stages, neonatal care, and women's health. Each chapter follows a similar format including key terms, learning objectives, and nursing care plans.
Purpose:The author's purposes include the dissemination of current knowledge, fostering an understanding of the sociocultural aspects of care, and examining some of the gender specific issues involved in caring for women during their lifespan. These objectives are interesting, but fulfilling them alone will not provide the basic knowledge needed by student nurses learning to care for the maternity client.
Audience:The material is focused on nursing students in a maternity and women's health course. It would be too basic for residents and advanced practice nurses. The author is a faculty member of an online nursing program.
Features:The book covers basic topics in perinatal nursing, but lacks depth in some of them, such as EFM. It includes NIC/NOC classifications and the figures are clear and basic. The concept of "laboring down" is not mentioned in the labor and birth chapter. The book uses a great deal of color, sometimes to the point of distraction, and is printed on a rather glossy paper that makes reading in some lights difficult.
Assessment:An additional textbook in maternity and women's health nursing is welcome, but this one lacks some of the detail and clarity of those currently available. The author's writing style is casual. Someof the references could be updated, i.e. Blackburn and Loper Maternal, Fetal, and Neonatal Physiology: A Clinical Perspective (Elsevier) has had two editions since the one cited.