Maternal Child Nursing Care, 4e [Hardcover]

This book is so bad my school is switching it out after only one semester of use.

The book is too wordy. There are newly introduced terms with no definition given until several paragraphs or often pages later. The terms are not bolded in any way. Some are in italics but you're so cross-eyed from reading the small print that everything looks italicized. No glossary to help you out either.

Finding information is a huge time commitment since the index is nearly useless. There are few things you can look up as common terms and find what you want.

There are no review questions at the end of each chapter which is something that we nursing students want to help us with the NCLEX. The accompanying website does have some questions but most of the chapters I've studied only have 3 or 4 questions. Not nearly enough for adequate review.

The content of many sections does not always provide the information that the section heading suggests. It may be several sections later when the authors repeat the subject. You will also find that different sections have conflicting data.

This book is completely frustrating. If your school uses it, good luck, and do your best to get them to change it if you get the chance.

I cannot understand the praise for this textbook I have seen from other reviewers. While the authors treat the medical/surgical aspects of maternal and pediatric nursing with due attention and thoroughness, the book suffers from an overall absence of consistent internal organization. Unlike my med/surg or psych textbook, each chapter has a different layout, and many of the chapters contain passages that wander, endlessly, until I actually forgot what subheading in what chapter I was reading. "Information overload" is a good way to describe it, although this probably would have been bearable if the authors had spent as much time organizing their material as they did actually cramming material into the book.

Where the textbook completely loses me, though, is in its many chapters devoted to the same old pop-PC psychobabble I've come to know and loathe in so many nursing books. Professors and other students may disagree with me, but I regard the inclusion of what is essentially sociology with a healthcare spin in what should be a book predominated by med/surg content a particularly loathsome phenomenon. This book, of course, has it in spades. Entire chapters are devoted to explorations of women's health, and are loaded with nauseating multi-cultural, politically-correct, New Age jargon. I'm not saying there's not a time and place for that (preferably in an entirely different textbook). Community health and women's health nurses, in particular, seem to love that sort of content (interpersonal energy flows, anyone?). At least the ones I've met. I'm saying it distracts from the med/surg fundamentals of women's health- you know, the actual medical and nursing science- to include hundreds of pages of social science in the same textbook.

There's also not a few unintentionally hilarious passages, such as this gem: "Gender influences provider-patient communication and may influence access to health care in general. The most obvious gender consideration is that between men and women."

Really? Between men and women, eh? Is that how that works? One wonders if the authors wanted to include a discussion of gender differences in health care between, say, men and hermaphrodites, or men and an alien species with a third gender, or men and transgendered men, or men and Archaea. Sheesh.

Edit: I bumped up the rating a star and changed the title of the review. Though the flaws I pointed out in this textbook remain, the material really starts to shine in later chapters that deal with the pathophysiology of pediatric illnesses. First-rate material, as good as or better than any straight med/surg text I have ever read.

I learned A LOT from this textbook. I think I read like 80% of this textbook for my maternity/pediatric class. I love that it gets pretty in detail about the nursing interventions and even things that you can tell patients to do at home to take care of problems. The boxes, tables, charts were also all very helpful, especially on the days before exams when you don't have enough time to read the chapters. :D