When it comes to caring for children, no other resource better prepares you for practice than Wong’s Essentials of Pediatric Nursing. Authored by Marilyn Hockenberry and David Wilson, two of the most well-known and respected names in the field, Wong’s features the most readable, up-to-date, and accurate content available. An abundance of full-color illustrations helps you visualize key concepts, and highlighted boxes and tables offer quick access to vital facts and information. Plus, when you buy this book, you get unlimited access to hands-on study tools that help you learn pediatric nursing essentials with ease!
I agree with a couple of other reviewers in that this gives a somewhat superficial overview of pediatric nursing. The charts, graphs, and tables are wonderful but if you're digging for pathophysiology or pharmacology relevant to a disease process, this is not the place to look. Great for my 8 week crash course, but if I were to choose pediatric nursing as my future, I would look somewhere else.
Clear and easy to understand, but information is pretty superficial. If want detailed info regarding pathophysiology or treatment modalities, you'll have to look elsewhere. It does a great job, though, of sensitively discussing the deep psychosocial impact of child's illness, injury and/or death on the entire family.
This book is NOT a great resource for childhood infections, diseases, or specific information. I couldn't use it for a reference on any care plan, because it really isn't specific enough with rationales or theory.
Good introduction to the mentality needed to work pediatrics, though, which is probably great for nurses in the field. Not as helpful to students who really need a valuable resource for information that is conscise and clear, but a decent start to perspectives in pediatrics.
This book.. It's .. no wait. Let me go back and make it one star. There we go. This book. If I learned anything from it, it was in spite of the authors who, I am telling you, must have had a thesaurus open when they were writing. Every time they could, they used a word just slightly more technical than the rest of the writing. Without access to the internet, I wouldn't have known what was going on. I'm not a professional, yet, but I have been attending related courses for several years, now. Even if my personal vocabulary was inadequate, I find it frustrating to have to refer to wikipedia to get answers when the book could just as easily do so. Further, they would introduce diseases by acronyms that it would not define for multiple paragraphs. This would almost always send me back, searching for where the term had been explained prior to its actual introduction. I'm not entirely certain many of the abbreviations used were actual 'official' or if they just didn't feel like typing out the disease name more than once. Somehow, even with all of this, it was incredibly repetitive. I kept thinking I'd already read something only to find that it repeated itself. In one notable instance, it used the same sentence twice in one paragraph (with one sentence in between). This book cost quite a bit of money. It would be nice if by the 9th edition it had experienced more thorough editing.
All in all? I'm glad I'm not using this book to learn from, any longer. I recommend you seek elsewhere, if at all possible.
A really great source for pathophys of children's illnesses and diseases, as well as info on family-centered care and child development. I will keep it!