Will I use my knowledge from prereqs in nursing?

Nursing Students Pre-Nursing

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Most nursing schools require the A&P's, chemistry, micro. How much of this knowledge will a nurse use on a regular basis?

Specializes in Complex pedi to LTC/SA & now a manager.

I use a significant amount of my pre-requisite education on a regular basis as a practicing nurse. Basic A&P knowledge is necessary when communicating with specialty physicians and other disciplines such as occupational therapy and physical therapy. Chemistry and biochemistry as well as biology background with physiology is needed for comprehending pharmacology and also when explaining drugs & expected actions/reactions to patients and their families.

The pre-req's are the basic foundation of your professional education that you build upon as you progress through your nursing education and professional practice.

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.
Never said I thought it was useless. I was asking a simple question looking for others thoughts....
LOVE your avatar.....some of it will be useless information but most of it you will use. It might not be the exact information you learn but it will apply to acid-base balance in the body, the metabolism/action of medicine in the body and how it effects/helps your patient, the micro-organisms that cause infection and how meds work to eradicate the infection in the body, How sepsis affect the body, how disease effects the body.

It will apply as much as you wish to apply it and utilize that information to take the best care of your patient.

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Specializes in Pediatrics, Emergency, Trauma.
Not at all nursing school will give you tons of more information that you must learn in a short time period. I feels as though my prereqs were weed out classes![/quote']

^Disagree....hope you are seeing the correlation of sciences and other prereq's in terms of knowledge of processes, whether its

communicating with peers and families, learning the WHY this patient has a set of symptoms vs another pt with the same diagnoses. Even with pharmacology...knowing A&P, micro, and Chem helped me understand pharmacokinetics!

If you decide to work in critical care, Most if not all of what I learned helped me...as a vent nurse most of my years, understanding theories and laws such as Frank-Starling's Law (helllloooo Chemistry, lol) helped me understand the why and collaborate more effectively.

You will learn more in nursing school....those prereq's will help tie the immense knowledge we know together.

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Specializes in Pediatrics.

The more you use the material learned in your pre-reqs, the more successful you will be. Not just in the sciences, but in all courses. People don't want to hear/believe this, but it's true. Those who laugh off the fact that they don't remember their anatomy, micro and growth & development, and (most of all) math are usually the ones who struggle through nursing.

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You won't use all of that knowledge every single day as a nurse, but you will use it all at one time or another. A & P is a constant in nursing. Not only are you supposed to understand disease processes as they occur, but your knowledge of A & P can help you anticipate and head off problems BEFORE they occur. Chemistry is important not only for pharmacology, but for many disease processes. Renal patients, patients in diabetic ketoacidosis, etc. will be better off if you have a solid foundation in chemistry. Understanding which IV fluids are appropriate and why is important.

An understanding of microbiology, as already stated, is a critical component of the nursing process.

Take these classes seriously as they will serve you well once you get into the field.

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I may not use the information I learned in my pre-reqs on a daily basis, but they were invaluable in that they taught me how to learn, think critically, and develop my study skills. As someone who really struggled with their pre-reqs, crashing, burning, and picking myself up again to finish those pre-reqs successfully helped me become a hard-worn study warrior by the time I got to nursing school. Good luck!

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Most of it. I've screwed up in Bio so far. I never had to study in HS and I came into college with that same frame of mind. Just memorize something long enough to get by. But this comes up to bite you in the rear later on. I have friends who are in nursing school who did this all throughout their pre-reqs and they're royally effed. Everything in medicine, health, science, math, etc builds upon one another. I've learned this the hard way and plan on doing better in my pre-reqs this upcoming fall. It's especially interesting when you're thrown into the field and you're seeing things happen in real life. It's very different from reading something in a text book. You have to take that knowledge and piece together a puzzle to figure out what's going on. We would have certain questions like that on some of my bio tests. Such as, "If a patient comes into the ER with a head injury and is experiencing loss of coordination and feeling on his left side, which part of the brain could be damaged?" That's when you have to remember things like the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. This is probably a silly and primitive example, but it's an example, nonetheless.

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