By Lesley Bowker, James Price, Ku Sha and Sarah Smith
3rd edition
Published 2018 by Oxford University Press
Price £34.99
This is another excellent addition to the ever growing and regularly updated Oxford Medical Handbook series. This new edition is a very helpful addition to anyone wanting to be up-to-date in the field of geriatric medicine. It is ideal for healthcare professionals working with elderly people and being published this year, it does seems very uptodate.
It is laid out in the standard and proven format of an Oxford Medical Handbook, full of practical and useful information. It is easy on the eye to read with plenty of bullet points or short paragraphs. Common scenarios are covered in just the right amount of detail and like the other books in the series, it is easy to dip in and read up on subject relatively quickly. Although ideal for helping a healthcare professional read round a topic generated by a patient interaction, it is easy to simply delve into any section of the book and read a small chunk.
As always, a book like this is packed with medical facts, common sense and there are gems such as how to deal with a few specific clinical scenarios. For example, there is a box on page 229 titled How to … Manage the older person refusing treatment, or on page 481 there is a box on How to … grade muscle strength. Elderly medicine is a large and diverse topic covering many specialties and subject areas and within its 29 chapters, this book makes a great effort in trying to cover these areas without overwhelming the reader. It is also an excellent resource for those in primary care as well as people in secondary care and provides enough coverage for what I would suspect is the majority of needs in common clinical situations. It is not a detailed textbook which is encyclopaedic but a helpful handbook covering everyday topics and a little bit more.
Like the other members of the Oxford Medical Handbook series, they are competitively priced and not too expensive and provide a healthcare practitioner with suitable assistance, especially when dealing with a patient and their common medical problems. It is easy on the eye to read and pitched at the level of a practicing clinician and is well worth a look. The Oxford Medical Handbooks continue to go from strength to strength and this is another excellent example.
Dr Harry Brown
August 2018
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