The text has a case-based theme. Patients are introduced in Unit 1, Scenarios for Clinical Preparation, and then threaded through the remainder of the book where appropriate to provide reinforcement and deeper learning of the material. Unit 2, Care of the Developing Child, provides an overview of growth and development. Unit 3, Care of the Hospitalized Child, is organized by body system.
Chapter-length Clinical Scenarios make up Unit 1. Each of the 14 scenarios in Unit 1 presents the story of a different pediatric patient with one or several conditions related to a given body system, told from the point of view of the patient’s parent (or, for a few of the older patients, from the patient’s point of view). Together, the cases cover patients of a diverse range of ages, levels of growth and development, backgrounds, and conditions and body systems involved, as well as a variety of aspects of pediatric nursing assessment, diagnosis, and intervention.
Greater breadth and depth of content emerge as the reader continues; Units 2 and 3, although still striving for compelling context, offer a more traditional textbook format, which provides a greater wealth of information. Through the case snippets in these units, which prompt students to recall patients from Unit 1, students can link these later units to those scenarios.
“Whether it is in clinical or the classroom, stories are going to stick with students. The storytelling in Unit 1 is much more powerful than a straight lecture. Rather than memorizing what to do, storytelling helps students with their clinical judgment through the visualization of well-developed characters that are the patient and his or her family. Through storytelling, students are able to reason through what the patient needs, priority assessment data, priority nursing interventions, and outcome measurements much more so than with traditional pedagogy.”
– Catherine Gannon Tagher, EdD, MSN, RN, APRN
“I feel strongly about teaching with case studies because it is so hard to teach growth and development by reading a chapter on it. But each one of those case studies gives a real life way of teaching this important concept. And for me, when I was teaching peds, growth and development is so simple but so hard to teach, students always struggled with some of those ideas for each of the ages. The case studies really home in on this and it’s a different way to teach growth and development rather than going through stages and ages.”
– Lisa Marie Knapp, DNP, MEd, RN, CCRN
