Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus putes may arise when the plaintiff (a patient, or his or her estate) alleges that

compensable injury was sustained by the patient because the facility owed him or her a duty to provide treatment at a reasonable standard of care, but fell below that standard. Before the court can apply legal principles to the case and render a judgement, it must examine the evidence presented by the parties and determine "what happened." The facility's defence may depend upon the information contained in the patient records, but the records will be admitted as evidence only if they comply with the rules of evidence established in leading cases (and in many provinces codified by statute). Thus we see that many of the guidelines set out above for maintaining sound patient records (the requirement of timely entries made by a person with personal knowledge of the facts) are also legal requirements for the admissibility of the record in court. Further, even if the record is legally admissible, its credibility may come into question if entries are not chronological, pages are missing, pencil is used, or the author changes pens in the middle of an entry, etc. In addition to rules of general application for the maintenance of patient records, the authors have included checklists and sample forms to good effect. However, it is beyond the scope of a 148-page volume concerned with the law across Canada to function as a comprehensive manual for any particular facility. From province to province there are different statutes governing different kinds of health care facilities. While statutory and case references are carefully footnoted, the authors are able only to select the law of one or two provinces for discussion, and refer readers to the health facility's lawyer to deter-

205 mine the law in their own jurisdiction. Non-lawyer readers wishing to know more about this small corner of the law will be pleased with the authors' lucid, easy style. Their work is free of turgid legalese, although the exclusive use of the male pronoun to describe both men and women is objectionable. Health care consumer advocates will find a decidedly institutional bias in the book. The chapter on patients' access to their own records repeats the standard arguments for keeping patients in the dark arguments that have been largely discredited wherever liberalized patient access has been tried. The sample "patient's property release" form included in the appendix is drafted to relieve the hospital of responsibility for lost belongings even if they were held in the hospital safe or were stolen by hospital staff. The Canadian Law of Patient Records will be a welcome addition to the libraries of hospitals and other health care facilities. It will be of particular value as a reference work for administrators who must establish and revise their facility's written policies on the maintenance of records. Issues such as the length of time an institution must retain patient records, the microfilming of records, computerization and record linkage, and liability risk management and incident reports should be addressed as part of any facility's patient records policy. The authors devote a chapter to each of these topics. But the balance of the book will be of interest to any health care professional who makes entries in patient records. David Giuffrida is a lawyer serving as a Psychiatric Patient Advocate at Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto.

Donald D. Hammill, Nettie R. Bartel, and Gary Owen Bunch Teaching Children with Learning and Behavior Problems Toronto: Allyn and Bacon, 1984 (527 pages) Reviewed by Anne Schlieper Donald Hammill is Executive Director of the Society for Learning Disabilities and Remedial Education. He has taught at Wichita State and Temple universities and has authored several texts. Nettie R. Bartel is professor of Special Education at Temple University. Gary Bunch is Director of the Graduate Program in Education at York University. Practitioners of special education draw heavily on American paradigms and initiatives. From many points of view this attitude makes sense: social, linguistic, and cultural commonalities are sufficiently strong to ensure a fair degree of professional overlap. There are, however, large

206

Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 1986, 27:2 in any part of Canada. For instance, Bunch mentions province-to-province differences in legislation and funding, service delivery to Far North communities and isolated areas, language-ofeducation problems, and lack of adequate test norms. Useful references, including several provincial ministry publications, are provided. This chapter would be a relevant and rational preamble to a text that focused on Canadian problems. What actually follows, while of value in its own right, is a disappointing non sequitur to Bunch's introduction. This text begins with a general statement on special education needs and continues with chapters on reading, spelling, handwriting, composition, mathematics, language, behaviour problems, and perceptual-motor training. The traditional subject-area chapters are its strongest feature and include excellent scope-andsequence charts, useful information on identification, and practical remedial suggestions. The chapter on language achieves an impressive summary presentation of a very large amount of information but appears less relevant to most classroom problems related to language. Behaviour problems are approached via a useful review of behavioural assessment and behaviourmanagement techniques and a rather uncritical description of "projective" (dynamic) interventions. The coverage of perceptual-motor training is included only to caution teachers against expecting that such training will produce academic gains. Overall the text is useful as a practical reference but is beginning to show its age. Few references postdate 1980, there is no discussion of computer use in special education, cognitive interventions are mentioned only briefly, social skills diagnosis and training is neglected, and perceptual-motor training no longer seems the live issue it was a few years ago. A thorough updating would bring the text into step with the current (international) scene and ensure its continued use both here and elsewhere. The disappointment felt on reading the text did not arise from its to-be-expected need for updating but from its lack of effective lateral expansion into key areas of Canadian concern. Textual changes are minor and the vital problem areas defined by Bunch are mentioned in passing or receive no mention at all. For instance, the question of Canadian norms for tests developed in the United States is a complex and important one and is especially pressing for those working with francophone children. Two paragraphs

and extremely significant areas in which this international match is far from complete. Education inevitably is concerned with issues that involve national, regional, and even local conditions. This is particularly true of special education, which frequently must make provision for children whose exceptionalities are intermeshed with the specifics of their environmental and cultural situation. Workers in special education respond to these issues as best they can with very little assistance in the form of Canadian publications. The appearance, therefore, of a Canadian edition of a well-known, practical, problemoriented text raised hopes that help might be at hand. These hopes are not met: educators faced with Canadian problems should not look to this book for Canadian answers. Teaching Children with Learning and Behavior Problems (Hammill and Bartel) was published in 1975 and re-edited in 1978 and 1982 as a practical reference book for classroom teachers. The 1984 "Canadian Edition" by Hammill, Bartel, and Bunch essentially consists of the 1982 text with an introductory chapter by Bunch and with additions and deletions aimed at providing a Canadian orientation. The authors seem deliberately to have kept the book's Canadian features separate from the basic text. Not only are there two prefaces and two introductory chapters: all textual additions are referenced in a separate bibliography and separate subject and author indexes. This referencing system is especially irritating because it is not always possible to guess from context whether a citation will appear in the "standard" or the Canadian listing. Finally, a useful list is given of Canadian sources for tests and materials. The overall effect of this format is to emphasize the book's discontinuities and to remind the reader that the preexisting text has not undergone a major revision or re-integration. Most of the book's Canadian content is found in Bunch's introductory chapter, "Special Education in Canada: An Overview." This chapter, the only one in the book with a Canadian focus, provides an informative survey of prevalence, legislative and administrative structures, delivery of services, and current concerns such as mainstreaming, identification, language, and teacher training. The chapter's length (27 pages) precludes extensive discussion of any of these issues: rather, problems are introduced and placed in context. These problems are well known to teachers who have trained and worked

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus (p. 37) are devoted to this topic. Identification and remediation with Native groups, clearly spelled out as a major concern in Bunch's introduction, is accorded passing mention in one of the two paragraphs on page 37. A third issue raised by Bunch is the provision of special services in the language of instruction to children studying in a second language. This issue, in my opinion a highly important one, affects more children than many of us realize. In 1983/84, for instance, over 100,000 children were enrolled in formally designated French Immersion programmes (Commissioner of Official Languages, 1984). Many others attended regular French or English classes while they learned their language of instruction. Second-language special education not only is an area filled with absorbing challenges, it is an area in which typically we make decisions and take actions based on incomplete or conflicting guidelines. 1 found no men-

207 tion of this area after the introductory chapter. In summary, this ill-assorted book offers a stimulating Canadian-focused introduction to a worthwhile but rather time-worn text that does not cover Canadian issues in any meaningful way. A better book might have resulted from an updating for the international market rather than from this attempt at Canadianization. Our need for material that addresses the specifically Canadian aspects of special education is as great as ever. Reference
Commissioner of Offical Languages. (1984). Annual report 1983. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada.

Anne Schlieper is the senior psychologist in the Psychoeducational Programme, Psychology Department, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

Charles Bouton La neurolinguistique Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984 (128 pages) Compte rendu par Josiane F. Hamers Docteur es Lettres et professeur de linguistique, Charles Bouton enseigne depuis de nombreuses annees dans diverses universites nord-americaines, en plus d'effectuer des travaux a ihopital Sainte-Justine de Montreal. Dans cet ouvrage d'une collection de vulgarisation scientifique Charles Bouton introduit le lecteur a des notions elementaires en neurolinguistique. Dans une premiere partie, il presente revolution historique de l'interet pour les troubles du langage, evolution qui a mene a la creation de la neurolinguistique en tant que discipline lorsque la reflexion linguistique et la reflexion neurophysiologique ont pu se rencontrer. La deuxieme partie du volume traite de la naissance de la neurolinguistique moderne: le deuxieme chapitre de cette deuxieme partie donne une description de l'apport neurolinguistique a differents niveaux d'analyse linguistique alors que le chapitre suivant decrit le probleme important de la dominance cerebrale. La troisieme partie de l'ouvrage, intitule Maintenant la Neurolinguistique Appliquee, traite des troubles du langage chez l'enfant et chez l'adulte aussi que de 1'analyse neurolinguistique chez le bilingue. Dans un domaine aussi vaste que celui de la neurolinguistique, l'auteur a le merite d'avoir tente un tour d'horizon en 126 pages. Ce n'etait, certes, pas une tache facile et il n'est pas etonnant de constater que plusieurs aspects de la neurolinguistique n'ont pas ete abordes. Une faiblesse evidente de l'ouvrage me semble apparaitre dans la derniere partie du livre ou une trop grande place est faite aux aspects pathologiques de la neurolinguistique, alors qu'il est peu fait mention des recents developpements sur le fonctionncmcnt neurolinguistique de l'individu normal a l'exception de l'individu bilingue. Une autre faiblesse de cet ouvrage est qu'il donne l'impression d'avoir ete ecrit il y a quatre ans et non en 1984; en effet, tres rares sont les travaux cites apres 1980, ils ne depassent pas 1981 et la majorite des travaux cites s'arretent a 1977-1978. Plus genant encore, ce retard par rapport aux publications recentes entraine le fait que dans la majorite des discussions fondamen-