med surg

Med surg is a lot of material to remember. The way I remembered all the diseases and its process is in a specific order.... What it is... patho... clinical manifestations and s/s... treatments... complications (what happens if things go bad)... and then the nursing process. I tried to do that with every disease. And then purchasing an additional book such as a nclex book to quiz yourself on that disease will also assist you in remembering it along with reading and understanding the rationales. Pretty much what you are doing is preparing yourself for the nclex in so many words.

Send me your email address. I would like to forward you something that also helped me throughout med surg.

Hope this helps...

NrsNikster

my email is [email protected] you

Honestly I thought acute care, our equivalent of "med surg," was rather thoughtless, very boring, and not all that time consuming. The difficulty for all of us, not just me, was more in appearing like you were doing something rather than actually doing something.

Here's how it went down.

We'd get there stupid early and sit around b****ing about how early it was for about 20 minutes, and then we'd go watch the morning shift change report. That was a rather peculiar and awkward process because of the nature of the conference room (a separate story in itself). We listened to whatever they had to say about our assigned patient(s) which we already knew a bit about since we were given patient information the afternoon before. If we were lucky when we got there in the morning the patient would be discharged and we'd aimlessly shadow a RN on the ward.

Next, I'd go find my patient(s), wake them up, do my head to toe, nonchalantly ask if they needed anything while going out the door, and then I'd leave to go fill out whatever forms I had information to fill out. If there were morning medicines we'd give them, and then I'd log that and meander around while the LPN students served breakfast. Then I'd go around again, make sure the LPN students picked up the trays, log what they ate, maybe do another vitals check to make it look like I was doing something, and give any other medicines if ordered. Back to the chart for more writing and I'd get to stand around for an hour or more usually.

Eventually lunch would transpire, and the same as above would take place minus the head to toe. Depending on the patient, I might stand around and B.S. with them, but I usually encouraged them to nap as it made life easier for all of us.

Over the course of the day I'd go bust in on random patients and procedures as I heard about them and watch whatever I deemed educational.

At the end we'd go to the post-conference and try to articulate what we learned that day which was often pretty difficult to do. An answer such as "Well, I have now memorized that meal consumption is on page 37 of the chart" never seemed to suffice.

I say it was a thoughtless process because we were governemed by their archaic charting system with not a computer one anywhere on the "med surg" ward. Seriously, not one computer. There were such a host of forms to fill out that you really had nothing to do or think about other than jot down the information and fill in the appropriate blanks. That did it all for you. Sure, you'd go monitor for medication effects and so forth, but if you knew the meds, and likely you would because you seemingly always gave the exact same ones, you were fine. We didn't make care plans or anything like that although we did in the foundational course that focused mostly on washing bodies and moving them around along with taking vitals, doing assessments, and so forth. They weren't extensive though.