Bedside Guide for Neonatal Care ─ Learning Tools to Support Practice

Neonatal care is a specialist area that often requires health professionals new to the field to acquire a specific set of skills and knowledge. This means that, even for experienced nurses, there is a need for clear and practical learning resources to ensure care of neonates is safe and accurate.

This book provides health professionals working with neonates with the core information they need to understand and deliver the care practices to neonates and their families in the hospital setting.

Written in an accessible A-Z format, it acts as a bedside guide to the key areas in practice, including Airway and Assessment, Drugs and Developmental Care, Infection, Jaundice, Psycho-emotional care of the family and Umbilical Care. Each practice area explored is supplemented with a range of tools to help guide delivery of the different procedures, including:

• Checklists that provide a clear, bullet pointed list of important practice points for each procedure
• Flow charts which illustrate clearly the different stages of each procedure
• Summary Tables which collate key points in an abridged format about particular practice areas
• Signposts to highlight links between different practice areas throughout the book
• Stop and Think boxes that alert the reader to important practice points and areas of caution
• Standard precautions to flag important infection control reminders
• Local variations to remind the reader to check and make note of local variations and practice points
• A topic-specific Glossary that appears at the end of each key term to provide concise explanations

Julia Petty is a Senior Lecturer in Children's Nursing at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She has worked as a neonatal lecturer and educator for over 15 years, 11 years of which have been as a lecturer leading neonatal programmes.