Essential Knowledge and Skills for Healthcare Assistants

This revised edition of Essential Knowledge and Skills for Healthcare Assistants is an accessible and comprehensive text designed to equip you with the necessary skills for your practice. This book equips you with the knowledge to provide the safest and most effective patient care possible and supplies comprehensive coverage of both primary and secondary care settings, with an emphasis on primary care. It provides evidence-based guidelines to ensure best practice that is matched to the National Occupational Standards, the Care Certificate and the qualification frameworks from around the United Kingdom (UK). The third edition includes the following: . an all-new chapter on safeguarding and expanded coverage on communication skills; . a comprehensive overview of the principal clinical skills that healthcare assistants (HCAs) need to master, including understanding physiological measurements, taking blood pressure, venepuncture, urinalysis, wound care, administering injections, and more; . essential non-clinical knowledge and skills such as communication and assertiveness, reflection, accountability, confidentiality and recordkeeping, health promotion, infection control, and more; . the evolving role of the healthcare assistant and training opportunities; and . application to practice throughout, with numerous case studies and activities to aid understanding. This is an essential guide for all those training as healthcare assistants, nursing associates and assistant practitioners, and a useful reference for students embarking on nursing, and health and social care programmes.

Zoë Rawles BN BSc (Hons) Retired Lecturer/Nurse Practitioner and Director of HealthTrain.

Section I: All change, 1 The evolving role of the healthcare assistant, Section II: Some useful stuff, 2 Understanding reflective practice, 3 Accountability and delegation, 4 Using protocols, 5 Communicating with patients, 6 Simple assertiveness skills, 7 Confidentiality, consent and record-keeping, 8 Safeguarding, 9 Health promotion: the key messages, 10 Keeping it clean: hand decontamination, 11 Chaperoning, Section III: Core skills, 12 Physiological measurements, 13 Understanding and measuring blood pressure accurately, 14 Understanding the heart: how to perform the electrocardiograph (ECG), 15 Venepuncture and capillary blood testing: best practice, 16 Kidney function and urine: performing accurate urinalysis, Section IV: More advanced skills, 17 Examining the feet of people with diabetes, 18 The skin and the healing process. basic wound care, 19 Understanding lung function and disease: performing accurate lung function testing, 20 Administering injections, 21 Ear irrigation