Medical Terminology Course?

Nursing Students Pre-Nursing

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Happy New Year future nurses! I am writing to ask a collective question or for recommendations. I am preparing to apply for multiple programs in the Seattle area and I have noticed that none of them require a medical terminology course as a pre-requisite. Do any of your programs require it? Does anyone recommend taking one of these courses? Are there alternate recommendations for learning medical terminology, aside from taking a formal course at a college?

Thanks all!!

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.

I've never taken a medical terminology course. I learned most of what I needed to learn in class; for everything else, we had a medical dictionary. This is the one required by my school, and is still going strong more than 10 years after I graduated. Although they didn't have the mobile version back then...

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My program doesn't require med term, but I took it anyway. I don't think it was terribly useful. I have never really ran into a situation where I thought "wow, I sure am glad I took that med term class, lr else I would have no clue what that meant!" You'll pick up/learn the terminology in other classes. Even if you do find yourself not knowing what something means, you can always go to the break room and look it up real quick in a medical dictionary.

Don't get me wrong, I have no regrets about taking the class. Education is always a good thing. But the class was by no means necessary, and I don't think I would really be having any issues in nursing school without the class.

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It isn't required at my school but it is recommended. I took it because it interested me.

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Specializes in Critical Care, Med-Surg, Psych, Geri, LTC, Tele,.

Medical terminology is not an RN prereq. But it was an LVN prereq so I took it so I'd have more programs to apply to.

I think it was helpful, but isn't mandatory to be successful.

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