The book is a useful addition to the growing literature covering

the nursing role, which, even within the nursing profession, is still

not clearly de®ned or accepted. A large portion of the book is taken

up with medical practitioners' training and role: however, a similar

treatment is not afforded to nursing, which is disappointing.

Nonetheless, Nurse Practitioners in Primary Care does much towards

describing and de®ning what NPs actually do and the patients',

nurses' and doctors' views of this role. The author has comprehen-

sively and carefully covered the issues around the introduction of

this `new nurse' and should be requisite reading for anyone involved

in the debate.

MAGGS REES RN, RM, MN

Nurse Researcher/Practitioner

Department of General Practice

Lianedryn Health Centre

UCL Hospitals Injectable Drug Administration Guide by

Shulman, Drayan, Harries, Hoare, Badcott (eds). Blackwell Science,

Oxford. ISBN 0-632-05027-6. Pp. 176. Price £12.99 (pb)

UCL Hospitals' Injectable Drug Administration Guide is the latest

in a series of very useful hospital-based formularies and drug

administration guides. As nurses are increasingly undertaking

injectable, including intravenous, drug administration and the range

and use of drugs for injectable administration becomes ever more

complex, the publication of this small text offers a useful reference

source for nurses and other healthcare professionals.

The content of the book is logically structured, with an initial

section offering a range of information on topics such as drug

administration policies and features speci®c to injectable drug

administration such as the management of extravasation. It would

have been useful in this section to outline an approved method of

performing drug calculations and a little more information on the

risks involved in using mechanical pumps and syringe drivers.

For example, phenomena such as post-occlusion bolus are not

mentioned.

The second section of the book consists of an alphabetically

arranged list of more than two hundred drugs that may be given by

injection. This part of the text contains a wealth of information

including the formulation of the drug, guidelines for dilution,

recommended duration of administration, speci®c comments about

the characteristics of the drug and possible side-effects, as well as

information on compatibility with other drugs. Some information

speci®c to the administration of drugs to infants and children is

included, but more speci®c information about the management of

these special groups should be sought from specialist formularies

such as that published by Alder Hey Children's Hospital. Note

should also be taken that, when working with children, intramus-

cular administration, which causes such fear in children, should be

avoided.

A very wide range of pharmacists have been involved in the

preparation of this text ± and have done a very good job of it.

However, it might have been useful if doctors, as prescribers, and

specialist nurses, as givers of drugs, had also contributed to the

preparation of this guide.

The paperback format of the book should prove reasonably

durable and able to withstand the `rough and tumble' of frequent

use in busy clinical areas. I would hope that the editors will feel

encouraged to continue to keep this guide up-to-date and produce

further editions.

There is no doubt that nurses will ®nd this small book useful. It

should be available for consultation in any clinical area where drugs

are administered to patients by the injectable routes. I would

encourage all NHS Trusts to ensure that this reference book is

available in all such clinical areas. No doubt many nurses regularly

engaged in administering injections will wish to invest in buying

their own copy of this book, particularly in the light of its reasonable

price.

JIM RICHARDSON BA, RGN, RSCN, PGCE

Lecturer in Nursing Studies

School of Nursing Studies

University of Wales College of Medicine

Advanced Design in Nursing Research, 2nd edn P. J. Brink

and M. J. Wood (eds). 1998. Sage Publications, London. ISBN

0±8039±58. Pp 413.

Some 20 years have passed since Brink and Wood ®rst presented

their tiered framework for classifying research designs. This

organizational scheme formed the basis of the ®rst edition of

Advanced Design in Nursing Research, published in 1988, and is

retained and re®ned in this second edition. The framework is based

upon the premise that levels of theoretical knowledge are inextri-

cably associated with research designs. The taxonomy is founded

according to the knowledge about the operations of variables under

study, and the degree of control that can be exercised in the research

process. The three levels of design include experimental (level III),

survey (level II) and exploratory±descriptive (level I), each of which

contain two subdivisions: experimental±quasi-experimental, com-

parative±correlational and descriptive±exploratory, respectively. At

successively higher levels of design, the degree of control and the

level of knowledge about variables increases, although the funda-

mental philosophical assumptions for this proposition are not

overtly discussed.

In this new edition, existing chapters have been shuf¯ed within

the framework to conform more tightly with the structural format to

the extent that the original miscellaneous `other types of research

design' section has now become obsolete. Two new chapters have

been included within the text, namely, `within-subject' designs

(J. Lander, chapter four) and `structural equation modelling'

(P. Ratner, J. Bottoroff and J. Johnson, chapter eight). The latter

chapter could be considered to be incongruent with the remit of the

book, because it does not refer to a research design per se but to a

sophisticated statistical technique used in the analysis of theoretical

models. Nevertheless, this additional topic underpins in a demon-

strable fashion the relationship between theory and research that lies

at the core of the text.

This cohesive and progressive book is systematic in structure

with each chapter moving from general principles to speci®c design

types, noting strengths and weaknesses, ethical considerations,

reliability, validity and methods of data analysis. Published nursing

research studies are skilfully incorporated in an illustrative and

critical fashion. Although comprehensive in scope, arguably the

forte of this text concerns the higher order research designs in the

taxonomy using predominately quantitative data collection methods

and analysis. That is not to say that the exploratory±descriptive level

Book reviews 228

Ó 1999 Blackwell Science Ltd, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 8, 227±229