are you on a floor yet? I hear once you start working a whole lot more with more patients and you are focused on ONE type of pt (ie L&D, Cardiac, Pulmonary etc) you are using the same meds over and over and it gets a lot easier. I also hope my preceptor can give me some good tips..because we will be one on one instead of this 10:1 with your teacher in school.
My next plan is to pull my pharmacology text out now that I'm much more familiar overall than when I took pharm..it is broken down by class and I've heard that is the best way to learn them. I'm going to start with the ones I will be using regularly.
For instance, I am going into cardiac so I'm going to sit down and really study ACE Inhibitors... which all end in ...pril ... read up on side effects and important nursing interventions. I will probably even make up a reference sheet. Then do the same for Beta Blockers, etc. I plan on keeping a little reference notebook and I want to keep these in there.
I think the hardest for me are things like narcotics because we very rarely gave them in school...esp IV because we only did IV meds like 3x a semester.
As far as dosage - never give more than 2 or so of anything without questioning the dose! If it looks like you are suppose to give them 4 pills or vials etc you best be double checking.
Even the RNs I work with where I intern (wait..USE to lol) said you learn them when you work and use them..in school you learn a few you give regularly but it's not with enough frequency to really truly have it down pat. There is also a medication forum on Allnurses that is good reading.
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