Sick/Not Sick: A Guide to Rapid Patient Assessment: A Guide to Rapid Patient Assessment (Continuing Education Series)

When seeing pt’s in the field, book provides brief information and insights. Gives good thought provoking dialog to help you do a better triage of your pt complaints and what you are actually seeing. Helps you make better decisions for a PoC.

This book should be a required read for all EMT students regardless of level. As the book clearly outlines, acurately determining a patient's health status in the first minute on scene can often determine if the outcome of the call will be positively managed. It would be nice to see the book written with more ALS skills in mind. For example, when you consider airway management, the ALS provider must also consider CPAP and Intubation, etc. The book does a great job at outlining a call from a BLS viewpoint as the BLS provider must determine when/if an ALS provider is needed. While great ALS interventions always begin with great BLS skills, it would also be nice to see the book written from an ALS provider's viewpoint as the initial arriving unit. However, this in no way diminishes the value of the book as a 5 star book!

The overall concept is good, very nice nuts and bolts approach to the genreal impression and primary survery. The concepts of 'Sick-Not Sick' are applicable to BLS, ALS and even hospital/clinic based providers. That being said my only critiscm of this text is that fairly quickly into the text it becomes clear that the target audience of the author is first responders and BLS providers. The primary survery approach outlined in this book is an excellent apporach for providers of all levels, EMT's, Medics, Nurses, etc. anyone that works in prehospital, urgent or emergent care would benefit from this book. My suggestion for future editions would be to make some minor language changes to make this book more universal for providers of all levels.

Content could be covered just as well with a 60min PowerPoint presentation. Good for the EMT student. Spend an afternoon with it if there's a bargain used copy; run through it once and you'll likely never use it again. If your rapid assessment skills are decent and you know when to call for ALS, you don't need this.

I have had the pleasure of meeting the author and find that this is a very comprhensive guide for such a short book in being able to quickly triage and determine a treatment pathway based on the acuity of the patient.

This builds on the AAOS text used for class. Is a good refresher book, focusing on the skillset for initial assessment and treatment.

I don't know if my expectations were too high or different, but the content did not really address what I was looking for. The book was fairly short of a read, which in hindsight is probably because this is a guide to RAPID patient assessment. Guess it's meant to supplement your foundational textbooks. Read other reviews to see if this is actually what you are looking for; it was not for me.

Great resource for an EMT. Great book.