Nurse's Assessment Video Series has been created to help nurses like you perform more rapid and accurate assessments of the serious signs and symptoms you regularly encounter in your patients. Typical problems—abdominal pain, crackles, chest pain, dyspnea, fever, and many others—are identified and thoroughly explored. Everything you want to know about expert assessment is yours whenever you can spare a few minutes to relax in front of your television.

This groundbreaking video series will quickly help you:

identify normal and abnormal findings with more precision refine your physical examination techniques interpret your findings more knowledgeably plan for immediate care and follow-up more confidently integrate assessment findings and diagnostic test results.

Assess abnormal signs and symptoms quickly and accurately with our newest video series, Nurse's Assessment. This series takes you where you've never been before--inside your patients' cells, tissues, and organs. Cutting-edge computer-generated graphics, animations, and realistic sound effects are integrated into live-action video footage to guide your assessment.

Nurse's Assessment focuses on patients with serious signs and symptoms, such as chest pain and dyspnea. And it presents this vital information in a visually exciting and absorbing way that will add a whole new dimension to your understanding of assessment.

In it, you'll find these valuable features:

• ALERT! You'll instantly be made aware if a patient's signs and symptoms are life-threatening.
• EXAMINATION TIPS. You'll see how to perform essential physical examination techniques and how to tailor your assessment to accurately and expertly assess your patient's sign or symptom. In the Vascular Signs and Symptoms video, for example, you'll see how a confident nurse, hearing a possible bruit over her patient's right carotid artery, used the appropriate examination techniques to confirm or rule out her suspicions. You'll watch (and hear the sounds she hears) as she correctly:
  • Uses the bell of the stethoscope
  • Presses gently to avoid occluding the artery
  • Has her patient hold his breath during auscultation
  • Auscultates at several points along the carotid artery
  • Listens for the characteristic soft, low-pitched, rusing sound that a bruit makes during systole
  • Ausculates both sides of the neck
  • Has her patient breathe deeply between auscultations
• PATHOPHYSIOLOGY CLOSE-UP 3-D. animations take you inside the body to show how changes at the cellular, tissue, and organ levels lead to signs and symptoms you assess every day. In Signs and Symptoms of Infection video, for example, you'll see how normal temperature is regulated and how a bacterial infections affects the hypothalamus and produces a fever.
• KEY TEST RESULTS. You'll learn why your assessment findings and your patient's diagnostic test results (including 12-lead ECG, chest X-ray, blood, and endoscopic) point to a specific probable cause.
• NORMAL FINDINGS. You'll see and hear normal assessment findings so you can accurately differentiate between normal and abnormal. The Respiratory Signs and Symptoms video, for example, features highly accurate normal breath sounds of air moving freely through the trachea, bronchi, and bronchioles, and then you'll hear how abnormal sounds are produced when airflow is impeded.

Eye-opening animations give you an unprecendented "inside look" at the causes of your assessment findings. Nurse's Assessment VIdeo Series takes you where you've never been before-- inside your patients' cells, tissues, and organs. Cutting-edge computer-generated graphics, animations, and realistic sound effects are integrated into live-actions video footage to reveal, for example: why a murmur makes a rushing sound; why the jugular vein distends during heart failure; how crackles are cuased. These, and many other animations, present this vital information in an exciting, absorbing way that will add a whole new dimension to your understanding of assessment: your insights into the causes underlying your findings will deepen; your patient care will become more focused and effective; you'll become a more valuable, respected member of the health-care team.

The only video series that guides you in finding the probable causes of the abnormal signs and symptoms you face every day. Nurse's Assessment Video Series (unlike conventional assessment videos) doesn't present the step-by-step assessment of healthy patients. Instead, each video in this remarkable new series is geared to assessing and exploring the most common and serious signs and symptoms you see in your practice every day, including: chest pain; cough; hemiparesis, and the typles od disorders that cause them, including: myocardial infarction; pneumonia; CVA.

The above are only a small sampling of the frequently encountered sings and symptoms and disorders that this unique series presents. Even if you have years of nursing experience, you'll be amazed at how much assessment "know-how" you'll quickly pick up-- and how easy it is to apply it to your clinical practice.

A highly respected and informed Board of Advisors ensures that you benefit from expert tips, practical techniques, and the most accurate assessment information available anywhere.

Nurse's Assessment Video Series vividly shows you:

• How to access the most common and serious signs and symptoms
• How to perform key examination techniques
• How underlying pathophysiology causes abnormal signs and symptoms

It also demonstrates assessment tips the experts use to:

• Investigate signs and symptoms with greater speed and accuracy
• Identify probable causes
• Integrate assessment findings and diagnostic tests results
• Save time with focused, systematic assessments
• and much more

Plus, you'll receive three bonuses with each video:

• Continuing Education Test Booklets to earn contact hours. Just complete the multiple-choice test and return the completed answer sheet for credit for a low $6 procesing fee. When you pass, you'll receive an impressive, frameable certificate plus the test answers and rationales to further enhance your learning.
• Self-Test Booklets with questions, answers, and rationales to reinforce what you've learned. The multiple choice questions, with correct answers and rationales, help reinforce the video content and prepare you for the CE test.
• Quick-Reference Pocket Cards for a handy, portable information resource.

Included are some of the most common signs and symptoms you need to asses every day:

• Abdominal pain
• Bruit
• Chest pain
• Cough
• Crackles
• Fever
• Hematemesis
• Hemiparesis
• Hyperglycemia
• Hyperkalemia
• Hyponatremia
• Hypotension
• Murmurs
• Polyuria
• Seizure

You'll assess signs and symptoms more efficiently and systematically.

Focused Assessment: Shows you how to rapidly and accurately assess patients based on their specific signs and sympotms. In the Respiratory Signs and Symptoms video, for example, yu'll observe a nurse detecting bilateral crackles in a postoperative patient with a history of mitral stenosis. Stunning animations combined with true-to-life breath sounds take you inside the patient's body to show you exactly how crackles develop and how they sound. Only Nurse's Assessment Video Series offers you in-depth information like this.

Probable Cuse: Clearly demonstrates how to integrate all the findings discovered in the Focused Assessment and why they indicate a specific cause-- and why other related causes may be ruled out. For example, the patient described above had hypotension, tachycardia, tachypnea, diaphoresis, restlessness, confusion, and decreased urine output. You'll be shown why these signs and symptoms point to pulmonary edema as the likeliest cause. Throughout the video series, you'll also learn why other possible causes can be eliminated-- in this case, atelectasis and pneumonia.

Nursing Interventions: Summarizes key nursing interventions for the probable causes. For example, for the patient described above, you'll know to administer oxygen, a diuretic, morphine, a vasodilator, and an inotropic drug as prescribed.