Do nurses do med math

Published

A pharmacologist teaches our pharmacology class, and I asked her the other day "I know this is important, but I was told that nurses don't actually ever do dosage calculations in the real world nursing, is that true?" and she said yes, the pharm does that for you. I asked what about even checking to make sure an order is correct (because our nursing instructors warned us to always check if an order looks wrong) and she said the pharm always checks that too. But it made me wonder, why are there so many medication errors then? Do nurses do dosage calculations? Thanks.

How are you setting up your problems for dosage calculations? My instructor showed us a few ways. One clicked with me, the other was awful.

That's been part of my problem I think was that we learned the calculations using safe medicate online, and then the pharm teacher taught us differently and the questions aren't like safe medicate either (they're scenario questions). But I got it now! I just picked the way I like and figured it out for those type of questions. Thank you though!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Join the Discussion