A handy edition you'll find yourself dipping into

Oliver Phipps and Jason Lugg's Rapid Emergency and Unscheduled Care describes itself as a ‘revision pocket book that covers the key facts in a simple and memorable way’. It is mainly targeted at less experienced healthcare staff, such as students and the newly qualified. It will also be of some use to those with slightly more experience.

The book is ideal for those wishing to have a pocket-sized aide-memoire, covering core details across several disciplines of primary and urgent care that health professionals are likely to come across from day to day. This book might also appeal to community nurses—especially those working in primary and urgent care—ambulance workers; allied health professionals (AHPs); and doctors.

Despite being a fairly thin volume, it covers a surprising number of subjects in enough detail, making it more than simply a collection of bullet points. The paper the book is printed on is quite thick and the printing is good quality with no smudging or misaligned typesetting. It has no diagrams or pictures so if you also require anatomical diagrams, you may need to look elsewhere. On the other hand, it does have a selection of useful summary tables in each chapter with details to differentiate between similar types of complaint. For example, the fairly comprehensive table on wrist pain has direction towards which bony and soft tissue structures are most likely to be affected depending on the mechanism of injury or area of pain/deformity.