Nurse Education in Practice 9 (2009) e16
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Nurse Education in Practice
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/nepr
Book Reviews
Wong’s Essentials of Pediatric Nursing, Hockenberry, M.J.,
Wilson, D., Mosby Elsevier, St. Louis (2009), 8th ed., ISBN: 978-0-
323-05354-9
Children’s nursing and the care of sick children is undergoing
rapid change. Technological advances, increased emphasis on fam-
ily-centered care, ambulatory care and community care has made
caring for children more complex as increasing numbers of chil-
dren live with severe and life limiting illnesses. This complexity
has resulted in children’s nurses requiring an expanded amount
of knowledge to enable them to practice as safe and competent
practitioners. In this eighth edition of Wong’s Essentials of Pediat-
ric Nursing, Hockenberry and Wilson have revised the content of
this reference textbook to reflect the rapid advances in children’s
healthcare. The book has an attractive brightly coloured cover with
carefully chosen pictures and is presented in 12 distinct units. Each
unit has varying amount of chapters. The manner in which the
book is structured and organised means that a student can refer
to this text on an as required basis.
Meeting the needs of the sick child and their family is par-
ticularly complex and challenging, and to be skilled and compe-
tent, nurses need to have the practical knowledge and a skills
base to care for the child and family as a whole. Wong’s Essen-
tials of Pediatric Nursing continues to be a core text book that
every children’s nursing student should have at their finger tips
to compliment lecture notes and to assist them to integrate
theory and practice. Each chapter has ‘nursing alerts’ and criti-
cal thinking exercises. Some units include specific boxes on
family-centered care to assist students develop competence in
providing family-centered care. The theme of family-centered
care permeates all the units in this new edition of the Essen-
tials of Pediatric Nursing and the ‘family’ is identified as the
patient.
doi:10.1016/j.nepr.2009.04.006
It is accompanied by a pocket size clinical companion for use as
a reference guide and also a study guide. The study guide’s chap-
ters correspond to those of the text book and are divided into
two sections. The first section of each chapter presents questions
to review the information presented in the text book with the sec-
ond section of the chapter presenting questions to enable the stu-
dent to apply critical thinking to nursing practice. It has perforated
pages for easy removal and may be useful as a resource for directed
learning.
The clinical companion is divided into chapters and appendices.
Each of these is useful in the clinical area for a student. In partic-
ular the sections on common childhood illnesses/disorders are pre-
sented in alphabetical order to give a synopsis of information on
conditions that are commonly seen in pediatrics. The accompany-
ing CD-ROM is an excellent resource accompanying this book as
students are guided through the pediatric video assessments, crit-
ical thinking exercises and case studies.
The book is contextualised for the USA with information relat-
ing to USA legislation polices and statistics, although the inclusion
of Canadian statistics is welcome in this new edition. Despite this
fact it holds relevance for all children’s nurses and the usefulness
of Wong’s Essentials of Pediatric Nursing continues long after com-
pletion of a programme in children’s nursing as a reference guide.
Maryanne Murphy
Thelma Begley
School of Nursing and Midwifery,
Trinity College Dublin,
24 D’Olier St., Dublin 2,
Ireland
E-mail address: maryanne.murphy@tcd.ie (M. Murphy)