The layout of the universal Nursing Consult navigation is similar to another Elsevier product, MD Consult, with tabs across the top that allow the user to easily jump to the various sections: Home, Drugs, Handouts, Journals, Books, News, Clinical Updates, and the Marketplace. Directly below is a static search bar that lets the user search across the entire Website or select the desired category from a pull-down menu.

The Drugs section consists of two areas: recent drug-related news (found under the Updates tab) and Mosby's Drug Consult (under the Contents tab). Information in the Updates section includes drug news updates, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals for new drugs, and drug indications and safety notices about newly discovered drug-related side effects and health risks. Information in this section is provided by the FDA, Reuter's news service, drug companies, and staff writers at Mosby's Nursing Consult. Citations to relevant studies mentioned in news articles are provided when available. Several common IV and PO drug calculators are also included in the Updates section.

The Contents tab provides electronic access to Mosby's Drug Consult, a drug monograph compiled by an editorial board of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and veterinarians. Users can browse for drug information in multiple ways: Indications (alphabetical list of conditions, such as “headache,” retrieves a list of drugs indicated for that condition), Ingredient (browse by substance name to retrieve a list of all drugs containing that substance), FDA-class, Category, Generic drug name, United States drug name, Global drug name, or across all these indexes using the Comprehensive Index. A Drug Identification Guide/Pill Images section allows users to identify pills by browsing using the first number or letter of the imprint code found on a pill. Currently, no function allows users to browse or search by pill shape or color.

Mosby's Nursing Consult licenses more than 8,000 patient education handouts from McKesson Clinical Reference Systems. Patient handouts are written and reviewed by physicians and pharmacists. Spanish-language handouts are available for many topics. Users can add up to two pages of customized instructions to patient handouts simply by entering text or copying and pasting existing text into a text box at the bottom of each handout. It is also possible to create contact information by either creating a profile that will default to customized contact information at the top of each handout or by manually entering up to eight lines of text. Contact information and specific patient instructions can be quickly and easily edited. Patient handouts can be located using a keyword search from the main search bar by selecting the Patient Handout category from the drop-down menu or browsing the broad categories Conditions and Treatments, Medications, or Spanish Handouts. Browsing is also available for more specific topics under the Conditions and Treatments by Category heading; the categories are Topics by Specialty, Adult Health Topics, Pediatric Health Topics, Senior Health Topics, and Women's Health Topics.

The Journals section offers several methods to simultaneously search Mosby's Nursing Consult and MEDLINE for citations to journal articles. Mosby's Nursing Consult includes twenty-three full-text journals (including Critical Care Nursing Clinics and Nursing Clinics), with portable document format (PDF) versions of articles available from 2003 forward. A basic keyword search is available and can be limited by the focus of the article to etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment. A thesaurus-mapping function includes conceptually similar terms in the search with no transparency in how terms are mapped. Users can create a more sophisticated search strategy using Boolean operators and field tags: abstract, article title, author(s), author affiliation, chemical compound name, language, major Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), MeSH, National Library of Medicine (NLM) Citation ID, publication date, publication title, abbreviated publication title, publication type, source database, and yearbook articles. The following customizations for searches are also available: author name, journal name, publication dates, study group (all, human, or animal), subject age (all; infant, newborn; infant; child, preschool; child; adolescence; adult; middle age; and aged), and article type (all, review, Cochrane, opinions, trials). Search results can be sorted by full text, then relevance (the default), or reverse chronological.

The Books section contains twenty-nine reference books selected to cover a broad range of topics relevant to nurses in clinical practice such as Swearingen's Manual of Medical Surgical Nursing Care and Mosby's Pediatric Nursing Reference by Betz. A basic keyword search is offered across all reference books or within a particular title, including the option to limit the search to a specific focus (etiology, prognosis, diagnosis, or treatment). A book can also be browsed separately by its table of contents or alphabetical index. The table of contents for each book is based on a hierarchical structure: chapter, then subsections of each chapter.

News articles relevant to nurses are updated daily under the News tab. Content is provided by Reuter's news service. Users can sort stories by date or specialty. Individual subscribers can create a customized list of articles from specialties they choose. The Clinical Updates section contains brief articles written by nurses. These updates are on specific, clinically relevant topics that nurses can be expected to encounter in their regular practice. They are, however, not formal literature reviews. The Marketplace section of this product provides links to the nursing books section of the Elsevier Website, where users can purchase titles directly from this publisher.