I will be starting as a new clinical instructor on Tuesday for ADN students. They do not go ahead of time and pick patients. They receive a patient the day of clinicals. My concern is, they are required to know about each medication before they give it. If they are expected to pass 9am meds, what is a good method for looking up the meds, being familiar with them prior to 9am in order to give medications on time?

They will be rushed first thing in the morning to hurry, pick a patient, barely introduce themselves before going to look up meds prior to administering.

I'm old school where we went the day before clinicals and already had medication cards written up for each of our meds prior to clinical day lol.

Thanks for any advice you can give me to assist the students in being successful, this is their first clinical rotation.

I just graduated from an ABSN program where we did not go the day before clinical and yet were expected to pass 8/9am meds on time. We didn't pick our own patients - our instructors posted a list of our assignments or told us who our patients were before going to the floor. If the patient was awake we could say hello, otherwise we'd go straight to work looking up their chart on the computer and using lexicomp/Google/drug guide books to look up their meds. Prior to med administration we had to give a full report to our clinical instructor as well as tell her all about their meds. This seemed to work well. I've never gotten to pick my own patient, but I can imagine that this is a very time consuming process. Perhaps you could assign instead?

Also, my medsurg instructor had us make med cards on the most commonly used meds for the floor prior to receiving our first patient. This really helped as most days the patients definitely had at least one med from this list, so I could just look at the information I'd already found about it.