Book excerpt: Critical Care Nursing Practice Guide: A Road Map for Students and New Graduates is an essential, step-by-step, practical guide that helps new nursing graduates, new critical care and nursing students assigned to intensive care units gain the confidence they need to provide optimal care to their patients. This comprehensive text teaches inexperienced nurses how to systematically assess their patients, plan individualized care, implement therapeutic modalities with competence, collaborate effectively and evaluate the effectiveness of nursing actions. Covering areas such as how to begin, organize, prioritize, analyze, reason, and decide in daily routines and emergencies in the critical care setting, this book enables the novice to become an expert in the ICU. Valuable features such as chapter objectives, summaries, and key terms are included.