Medicine Explained the UK Way
Free to download from Friday 23 October 2026
Nursing and medicine in plain English, checked against the guidance UK nurses actually work to: NICE, the BNF and BNFc, the NMC Code and the Resuscitation Council UK. Free for everyone.
For anyone with some contact with patients, or soon to have it, who wants to understand the reasons behind what they're asked to do. Every chapter can be read on its own.
Heading out on placement and wanting the "why" behind the task.
Finding your feet and working out what the observation chart is really telling you.
Clear explanations that fit around a busy working week.
Working towards registration and building the knowledge to get there.
Getting used to the way things are done in the NHS: the medicines, the units, the guidance.
Revising from study material shared online and wanting to know which parts hold up on a UK ward.
"Because clear words keep patients safe. When a handover is vague, a drug name is ambiguous or a guideline is half-remembered, mistakes happen."From the Introduction: Why "straight-talking"?
I qualified as a nurse in Romania in 2015, and not long afterwards I was starting out as a staff nurse on a surgical ward at Kettering General Hospital. It was a new health system, a new way of working and what felt like a hundred new abbreviations. More than ten years later, I still remember how that felt.
Since then I've worked on surgical, acute medical and cardiology wards, spent two years as a deputy charge nurse in a busy emergency department, and most recently worked on a children's ward. Wherever I've worked, someone always needs something explained: a student asking why we check a blood result before giving a medicine, a newly qualified nurse wondering what the observation chart is really saying, a worried son or daughter wanting to know what's happening to their mum.
I've given those explanations at the bedside, at the nurses' station and in the corridor at the end of a long shift. This book is my attempt to write them down properly, in plain English, and checked against the guidance UK nurses actually work to. I've made it free so that anyone who needs it can read it.
Ionut
How the body is put together, how medicines work, how common illnesses show up, and what UK guidance expects you to do about them. 299 pages, with a quick quiz at the end of every chapter.
Each chapter opens with a short, realistic situation from a nurse's day. The people in these scenarios are invented.
A point worth carrying in your head on a busy shift.
Flags something that can cause harm if it's misunderstood, such as a common dosing error or a dangerous myth.
Practical advice from the ward, the emergency department or the community.
Every chapter finishes with key points for revision, a quick quiz (137 questions in all, with answers in Appendix F) and references and further reading.
Normal values in UK units, about 250 UK references, a glossary of 185 abbreviations, and an appendix gathering every place the source material differed from UK practice.
A taste of the Introduction. No long tables of drug doses, just clear explanations and where to look things up. The whole book is free to read.
Coming Friday 23 October Download the book free (PDF)
From the Introduction
Healthcare has a habit of making simple ideas sound complicated. A patient who is "tachypnoeic with a reduced GCS" is breathing fast and is drowsy. A medicine that "inhibits the Na-K-2Cl co-transporter in the thick ascending limb" is a loop diuretic that makes people pass a lot of urine. Once you can translate between the two languages, a lot of clinical practice starts to make sense. That translation is what this book is for.
Straight talking doesn't mean cutting corners. The facts here are checked against the guidance UK nurses work to: NICE guidelines, the BNF and BNFc, the Resuscitation Council UK, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and its Green Book on immunisation, the NMC Code, and specialist bodies such as the British Thoracic Society, SIGN, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and BASHH.
You won't find long tables of drug doses. That's deliberate. Doses in a book go out of date, are easy to misread and are no substitute for checking the BNF at the bedside.
"It's the book I'd have liked to have when I started." The full book, all 33 chapters and six appendices, as a single PDF you can read on your phone, tablet or computer.
Free for everyone from Friday 23 October 2026. No sign-up needed.Free for everyone. No sign-up needed.
The book is free and always will be. If it helped you and you'd like to say thanks, you can leave a donation of any amount. Completely optional.
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Ionut Cesane is an NMC Registered Adult Nurse based in North Northamptonshire. He trained in Romania, qualifying in 2015, and then moved to the UK to start his nursing career in the NHS.
He has spent more than ten years at Kettering General Hospital. He began as a staff nurse on a surgical ward in 2016 and went on to work across acute medicine, surgical and cardiology wards. From 2020 to 2022 he was a Deputy Charge Nurse in a busy emergency department, running shifts, looking after some of the sickest people in the hospital and mentoring junior staff. Most recently he has worked as a registered nurse on a paediatric ward.
He wrote The Straight-Talking Nurse because he kept finding himself explaining the same things on shift: to students on placement, to newly qualified nurses and to worried families at the bedside.
Nursing schools, universities and NHS trusts are welcome to share the book with students and staff. Free to share in full and unchanged for non-commercial use, with credit, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Questions, or planning to use it with a group? Email hello@clicktown.co.uk