Acute Medicine in the Frail Elderly

'What this excellent new book adds to the field is a very clear focus on the emergency care of older patients...an excellent resource for specialists in other fields wanting to improve their own skills and knowledge when caring for older patients with complex needs. It will be of great use to nurses [...]
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'What this excellent new book adds to the field is a very clear focus on the emergency care of older patients...an excellent resource for specialists in other fields wanting to improve their own skills and knowledge when caring for older patients with complex needs. It will be of great use to nurses and allied health professionals, to trainees in geriatric medicine and to consultants. This book covers everything from key facts about population ageing and health, to assessment and investigation of older patients, to the common "geriatric giants" of falls, immobility, confusion and incontinence and on to more specialised chapters around stroke medicine or assessment of older surgical patients. This will be an excellent resource for clinical practice - it has really added to the field and is highly readable and informative. I for one will be recommending it to colleagues.' From the Foreword by Professor David Oliver, National Clinical Director for Older Peoples Services (England) Emergency care of frail older people is challenging but very rewarding.Older patients tend to be complex and therefore their assessment needs to be more extensive and include comprehensive geriatric assessment. It is the extras in their assessment that are not usually needed in younger patients, such as cognitive, functional and social evaluations, that make the difference in achieving a better outcome. This book describes the key features of high-quality care for frail elderly patients in acute hospital settings. With chapters on assessment and the characteristic non-speciifc ways that patients tend to present (such as 'confusion', 'collapse query cause' and 'off legs'), this practical guide is ideal to have on-hand. As well as common medical and surgical conditions, it also covers medication management, elder abuse, pressure ulcers and hypothermia, including the physiological changes seen in ageing and ways to define frail patients. Tables, diagrams and images are ideal for quick reference, and key points are summarised throughout the text to aid comprehension, providing doctors, nurses and therapists with both background and essential information to provide the excellent acute care older people deserve.