1st Edition

Essential Knowledge and Skills for Healthcare Assistants

By Zoë Rawles, Zoë Rawles Copyright 2014
    182 Pages 65 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    182 Pages
    by Routledge

    Covering all the essential components of healthcare assistant and assistant practitioner roles, Essential Knowledge and Skills for Healthcare Assistants is a practical and comprehensive text designed to equip you with the necessary clinical skills for your profession. This book:

    • Equips you with the knowledge to provide the safest and most effective patient care possible
    • Provides evidence-based guidelines to ensure best practice that is matched to the National Occupational Standards
    • Supplies comprehensive coverage of both primary and secondary care settings with an emphasis on the role in primary care
    • Includes information on accountability, communication skills, confidentiality and reflection
    • Uses a light-hearted and accessible style, with definitions, case studies and activities to aid understanding
    • Includes a Foreword written by Tanis Hand, HCA adviser at the Royal College of Nursing

    This is an indispensable guide for all those training as healthcare assistants and assistant practitioners, as well as a useful reference for students embarking on a degree in nursing or health and social care.

    All change
    Evolving role of the healthcare assistant (HCA)
    Some useful stuff
    Understanding reflective practice
    Understanding accountability and delegation
    A bit about protocols
    Before you start: the basic ingredients
    Communicating with patients
    Simple assertiveness skills
    Confidentiality, consent and record keeping
    Health promotion: the key messages
    Core skills
    Keeping it clean – hand decontamination
    Physiological measurements
    Understanding blood pressure and performing accurate measurements
    Understanding the heart and performing the electrocardiograph (ECG)
    Venepuncture best practice
    Understanding lung function and disease: performing accurate lung function testing
    Kidney function and urine: performing accurate urinalysis
    Skin and the healing process: basic wound care
    Chaperoning
    Finishing touches
    Training for the future

    Biography

    Zoe Rawles, Zoë Rawles