Book Reviews
The clinical placement: An essential guide for nursing students (2nd edn)
By T Levett-Jones and S Bourgeois
ISBN: 978-072953958-6; 2011; 251 pages; Elsevier, Sydney, Australia;
Reviewed by Marie Heartfield
Senior Lecturer/ELA Coordinator, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of South Australia, Adelaide SA
This second edition of The Clinical Placement: An essential guide for nursing students by Tracy Levett-Jones and Sharon Bourgeois continues the very useful work started in the first edition in providing an accessible student introduction to clinical placement with the six chapters essentially the same as the first edition and prescriptive in title. They are Chapter 1: Rules of engagement, Chapter 2: Great expectations, Chapter 3: How you act, Chapter 4: How you think and feel, Chapter: How you communicate and Chapter 6: Insights from clinical experts.
The book situates clinical learning as a significant and challenging part of learning to be a nurse. It overviews important and contemporary issues for clinical practice and effectively balances this with government and other report extracts, clinical stories and scenarios as well as plenty of learning activities to engage the undergraduate reader. This second edition includes references to health care and nursing in New Zealand and has new material on topics such as clinical reasoning, distance placements, therapeutic communication, emotional intelligence and information and communication technologies. In some sections references are updated without revising the discussion such as in the Chapter 1 section on interdisciplinary healthcare teams. This phenomena is now a core feature of contemporary healthcare and the list of health care roles has expanded by four in this second edition though the rationale for all health practitioners to at least know about and better still work with other healthcare practitioners remains (as in the first edition) couched within the aim efficiency rather than the more pressing agenda of quality care and patient safety. In contrast the Chapter 5 revision of communication is more comprehensive in addressing professional standards and technologies and includes many excellent references. Chapter 6 has many new clinical experts with some additional clinical areas.
The content is given added appeal by a new and better layout. The language remains effectively simple and clear though in places it perpetuates some stereotypes with militaristic phrases such as 'rules of engagement' used to describe entering clinical placement environments. The focus is on the immediacy of placement with transition to practice perhaps an area for future development. It is also unfortunate for an undergraduate student text that the book is heavy with references to the ANMC at the expense of the 2008 COAG announcement of national registration for health professionals including nurses. Recognising that publishing can be a lengthy business and jacket descriptions are about selling books, if any there is any mention of the national Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia in this text, it was buried too deeply for me to find.
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