Hi! I began my orientation to first year nursing on monday. For nursing skills we received a schedule with our skills tests, and our first dosage calc test is Oct. 4. Here is the thing, This chapter is all supposed to be self-learn; we are not taught anything about dosage calc during our skills lab. We do not even take med adminstration lectures until after 2 dosage calc tests. This does not make sense to me... I worked as a HCA for a year, and reviewed my basic math over the summer, so I do have a bit of previous knowledge. I just cannot understand how they expect someone who has not worked in healthcare or practiced to know this information in advance. We had a hour lecture on math tutorial, but all they did was give us a sheet of dosage calc questions and ask us to see what we could do. Afterward they went over the answers and told the class if they were having problems, to obviously seek help and start preparing NOW. But if everything is self taught... i am confused at to who we should talk to. They included things like identifying items on a supplier label, and put p.o., q6h, ti.d in their questions, just expecting the class to know. I can't even imagine how overwhelming this must be to the fresh students. Did anyone else have an experience like this?
I have around a month to prepare, what advice do you have? I always write down mnemonics and things I don't want to forget on my test paper before I even start the answers. I will obviously include the mnemonic for the metric system, anything else that may help me out? I have the Canadian edition of Med Math to work on (which again, we are expected to do as self study) and a couple of helpful sites I found on this forum to help me out, and i've sent them to my classmates as well. What else would you suggest I do to prepare??
