Head, neck and dental emergencies

  • M. Perry
UK: Oxford University Press price £19.95, pp 462 ISBN 0198529104 | ISBN: 0-198-52910-4

This attractively presented little book is a further addition to the Oxford Handbook series. It is in the pocket reference format with a plastic flexicover to which we have become accustomed since the first Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine was published 20 years ago, with matching ribbon page markers in yellow and red.

It aims to provide the reader with a working approach to the diagnosis and management of patients presenting in the accident and emergency department, concentrating, as would be expected from the title, on urgent and emergency problems above the collar bones. However of necessity the first three chapters covering general assessment, first aid measures and infections take a rather more whole body approach as do the concluding glossary and last two sections on burns and miscellaneous conditions.

The bulk of the book runs sequentially through trauma and other emergency conditions involving the head, neck, face, ears, eyes, mouth, teeth and salivary glands. On average one topic within each overall heading is covered over three pages with a system of four icons used throughout to allow rapid identification of the degree of urgency. The explanatory key to the icons appears helpfully on both the inside front cover and again within the preface.

The layout comprising short notes, diagrams and photographs, together with a comprehensive index, provides the reader with an easily assimilated set of information which should prove extremely valuable in an emergency situation. There is an emphasis on maintaining a high index of suspicion and on frequent reassessment to ensure that pathology and potential complications are not missed. A minor disappointment was the quality of some of the photographs, the majority of which are in monochrome which contrast with those in colour printed on higher quality paper in the chapter devoted to the eye.

The editor, a maxillofacial surgeon who has extensive experience as a trauma team leader and now based in Belfast, has drawn together 14 contributors from a range of surgical specialties, ophthalmology and dentistry. The book is recommended mainly for junior doctors and also nurses in accident and emergency, oral and maxillofacial surgery, ENT, ophthalmology, anaesthetics and plastic surgery as well as for medical and dental undergraduates. However it is likely to have wider appeal even to more senior colleagues who may not regularly deal with emergencies around the head and neck but who occasionally may be called upon to do so.