This book contains solid, research-based content presented in a concise, readable, and consistent format. Special features highlight the content that is most relevant and challenging for today's nursing students, including patient teaching, community and home care, gerontology, cultural and ethnic considerations, collaborative care, nutrition, and critical thinking. Nursing management content is discussed in a unique levels-of-care approach, with separate headings for Health Promotion, Acute Intervention, and Ambulatory and Home Care. More than just a textbook, it is a comprehensive resource with the essential information that students need to prepare for lectures, classroom activities, examinations, clinical assignments, and comprehensive care of patients. All content is written and reviewed by leading experts in the field to ensure that information is comprehensive, current, and clinically accurate. Extensive gerontologic content identifies age-related changes for each body system and alerts the nurse to differences often encountered in older patients. Attractive four-color design and over 1,300 full-color illustrations enhance learning by presenting disease processes and related anatomy and physiology more clearly. More than 70 comprehensive nursing care plans are thoroughly updated to incorporate current NANDA diagnoses, defining characteristics, expected outcomes, specific nursing interventions with rationales, evaluation criteria, and collaborative problems. Ethical Dilemmas boxes promote critical thinking for timely and sensitive issues that nursing students will face in practicetopics such as informed consent, patient adherence, guardianship, confidentiality, and sterilization. More than 70 Patient and Family Teaching Guides provide students with critical information to include in teaching patients about care of conditions and stress points for educating family members when they will be helping to care for the patient. Critical Thinking Exercises at the end of each nursing management chapter include Case Studies with Critical Thinking Questions to help students apply information presented and promote critical thinking. Also included are Nursing Research Issues questions to highlight current topics for research and encourage further study. Collaborative Management headings and Collaborative Care tables emphasize the importance of total patient care in todays health care settings and provide a clear understanding of each providers role in managing disorders. Multiple-choice Review Questions at the end of each chapter test students mastery of the content and correspond with learning objectives in the chapter openers. Nutritional Therapy tables summarize nutritional interventions and promote healthy lifestyles in patients with various conditions. Gerontologic Differences in Assessment and Effects of Aging tables present information about older adults special needs for nursing care. Nursing Research boxes apply research to clinical practice and cover such timely topics such as pain medication adherence, ethnic influences on cancer screening, family-centered focus in lung transplant care, health promotion for women with multiple sclerosis, and caring for battered women in the emergency department. Emergency Management tables outline the treatment of health problems most likely to create medical emergencies. Common Assessment Abnormalities tables alert the nurse to typically encountered abnormalities. Nursing Assessment tables summarize the subjective and objective data for which the nursing student assesses. Health History tables present key assessment questions to summarize important assessment parameters. Diagnostic Studies tables highlight important information relevant to diagnostic studies. Drug Therapy tables pull out medication information in a format that provides easy