If you are looking for a book to teach yourself or your staff about the very basics of Clinical Pathology and how it pertains to disease, then this book is perfect for you. If you are more interested in learning the in-depth details of how a disease process results in certain Clinical Pathology changes, you may be better served with a more detailed textbook.
The Forward expresses the importance of having well-trained, qualified staff performing the lab work necessary for patient care. It also explains why the staff should be proficient at the skills required to perform lab work, but also the reasons why the test is being performed, what the results mean, and how they pertain to nursing care and disease management.
There are fifteen chapters on different body systems, what the correlating lab work should look like, and what an abnormal result can mean. Because many diseases involve more than one body system, much of the information is repeated multiple times throughout the text. The order of the chapters also seems a bit disorganized as well, but information is very easy to find and reference. There are many beautiful photos, illustrations, and graphs throughout the book, though some are a bit complicated for the simplistic text it accompanies. In the early part of the book, there were many spelling and grammatical errors that could cause some confusion or misinformation (i.e. a caption for a photo for a cephalic blood draw states that the blood is being drawn from the cephalic artery).
The textbook comes with a CD-Rom that is meant to be used as a training tool for staff and/or students; however I found it very messy. While it may have been a formatting issue with my computer, I found it frustrating to use and couldn’t give it much time. It is set up as a PowerPoint presentation of different cases that are worked through based on the Clinical Pathology knowledge the student learned from reading the text. While the idea is a good one, hopefully other users don’t find the CD as hard to use as I did.
I found the best part of this text to be the Appendices. They are full of pictures, tables and algorithms, and one Appendix is for using the CD-Rom. There is also a very large, helpful Glossary as well. For the most part, this text is a very good beginner Clinical Pathology text book. It gives the very basics of running controls on lab machines, making and reading blood smears, using Unopette systems, normal’s and abnormal's for different body systems and how diseases affect Clinical Pathology. As someone who wants a lot of detail when learning or reading about a disease process and its resulting sequelae, I found myself wishing there was a bit more information, and resisted the temptation to pull additional textbooks for more information. Overall, this is a good book for a student or newly practicing veterinary technician or assistant. Veterinarians, due to their training, will not be likely to find this book useful, although their staff may refer to it frequently.
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010
284pg. Soft cover
ISBN: 978-0-8138-1008-9
VIN Store: unavailable
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