NLN PHARM TEST.... Help!!!!

Hello Tiffany, calm down and take a deep breath. When I took the NLN pharm test last year, it was mostly dosage measurement and conversions. I assume you have some experience with this. There were some questions having to do with interactions, and a few multiple choice ("select all that apply") questions.

Three weeks is plenty of time to study if you concentrate on learning three basic items of interest to the RN giving meds:

(A) Learn conversions cold. This means you memorize how many ounces are in a liter, how many milligrams are in a gram, how many kilograms are in a pound, etc. This set of flashcards can get you started on most of them: Pharmacology Conversions Flashcards - Cram.com.

(B) You learn dosage calculation. If the doctor orders 500mg of Medicine A, and it comes in a solution of 800mg/100mL, how many mL do you give the patient? That kind of thing. Do a bunch of exercises till this becomes second nature. Here is a worksheet I downloaded and used and it helped a lot: http://nursing--pharmacology.pbworks.com/f/100-Dosage-Calculation-Practice-and-Answers.pdf

© Get your head around the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. If a medicine affects the sympathetic system, it is called an adrenergic drug. Any adrenergic drug will affect adrenergic receptors all over the body. These speed you up. The other basic kind of drug is a cholingeric, which affects the parasympathetic system. As you might expect, these slow you down. So for example, an adrenergic drug would speed up your heart (among many other things), while a cholinergic would slow it down. Most drug questions dealing with medications on this exam will give you some kind of clue as to whether the drug is one class or the other. Learn which physical reaction in your body is tied to which nervous system, and you can usually ferret out the drug you want.

Finally, I would download Mosby's Memory Notecards for Kindle (you don't have a lot of time to wait on shipping). This resource is hugely helpful to let you see what medicines are in what class, and that will help you start to see patterns.

I passed the NLN test and you can too. Best of luck and study hard!