Psychosocial Nursing for General Patient Care

This text is used as a resource for a nursing course at the University where I teach. The course focuses on interviewing skills, and the students use the book to look at various ways of maladapative coping. Psychosocial nursing is usually thought of as the domain of mental-health nursing; but this is not true... "half this game is ninty per cent mental" as Casey Stengel once famously said. this should be required reading for every nurse who may get involved in customer relations activities in any setting. In health care we have a tendency to hire and promote nurses that are expert with technical skills, and then leaving them to their own devices when it comes to the thorny issues of how to manage the interpersonal relationship challenges that they will face. This book covers the issues of where the rubber hits the road. there are only two issues I have with it. the first is that it ought ot have a section on the so-called "normal patient" who has no difficulty coping. Maybe this woudl be too boring I suppose, but it would be nice to re-iterate a scenario to illustrate what it owudl be like if the nurse-patient interaction was working well. It would then give a practical jumping off point for the triggers of maladaptive bnehavior. the other point is that this book has no case studies to speak of... no "war stories". while reading it, I could think of a million incidents over the course of a thirty year career - something to support every description in the book. But when used with beginners in the field of nursing, or new to the idea of psychosocial assessment, there is no frame of reference. overall, this book is terrific! Joe Niemczura, Honolulu HI