1st Edition
Essential Knowledge and Skills for Healthcare Assistants
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