It seems to be en vogue in the publishing world at present to offer up publications which, by design, are intended to provide the reader with the briefest of overviews of a given area of health care. The problem comes when publishers and authors alike attempt to compress ‘health care’ as a whole into the slenderest of volumes and somehow advocate it as delivering a credible overview of something so incredibly diverse and complex. Unfortunately, so it is with this text.
The content may reasonably be promoted as diverse, but with topics ranging from the principles of recruitment and selection to prescribing medications, I struggled to identify the core purpose of the text. To compound matters, to suggest the content offers ‘a glance’ is stretching one's literary licence, as each chapter amounts to little more than one side of text. The diagrammatic content does little to offset this as the use of illustrations is also limited.
I do not wish to appear overly critical, especially as this book is targeted at healthcare students and newly qualified practitioners. But with an increasingly labyrinthine health economy and mounting challenges for those working within it, identifying the real value added of having such texts is becoming similarly challenging. I suppose the benchmark for this approach is the ABC series (same publisher), but they at least address one specific topic and devote the entire text to it. This, on the other hand, attempts to address 38 separate areas of health care in less than 80 pages. Not possible.
Students preparing for clinical roles within the health sector will be used to far greater critical enquiry than that which is offered here, and for those aspiring to a career away from the clinical dimension will likewise be expected to undertake more challenging reading in pursuit of their professional ambitions.
Not one to utilise on your Amazon Prime membership.