I know when I went to school, there was a pharmacology class. It was vital and I still refer back to it when I work.
I was speaking with a friend of mine who is in her 2nd year of nursing school and found out - there is NO pharmacology classes!! She said that in lecture, they will talk about some meds that might be commonly given, but it is nothing in depth, nothing about drug classes, how the meds work, etc... She said that the schools stance is "pharmacology classes are for pharmacists or doctors. its not your responsibility." She feels that the school is correct in saying this, but "maybe an extra class would help."
This pretty much horrified me!!!
Opinions?? Has anyone else heard of this?? Is this super common and I'm just naive?
she is having a bunch of classes on nursing diversity etc... its not a BSN program... still an ADN.
its just scary! but it explains a lot about what i see sometimes when orienting new grads... i dont think the reality of our job is being properly represented. sure - the pharmacist or the md need to know about the drug... but YOUR the one giving it and its YOUR responsibility to know what youre giving and catch errors!!! the thought process of "its not my job to know" leads down a danger path, IMHO.
Although the recently graduated culturally sensitive nurse might not recognize why Old Man River's, with the T-3 transection, gets bradycardic and hypertensive as hell after pushing 80mg of furosemide for his fulminant pulmonary edema...atleast he/she can probably define ethnocentrism much more accurately than the diploma nurse who knows to unkink the catheter.
Im in a BSCN program. I found that in my opinion, my nursing school had a good patho class but not that great of a pharm class. They would cover some common drugs as we went along (ex: endocrine section - insulin and oral diabetic drugs) but we were barely tested on pharm - mostly on insulin and cardiac drugs like dont give the antihypertensive drug if the bp is low, etc...thats about it from what i found. Compared to the descriptions Ive read from other nursing schools, I think that my school should up their pharm content!. We had a huge pharm book that no one ever seemed to read since we were barely tested on it. I found that we focused all on patho and very little on drugs, maybe a slide here or there thats about it
Our med calculations consisted of about 15 questions for a homework exercise. That's it. And they were easy like order is 500 mg...you have 1000mg, how much do you give? lol
It wasn't even graded and we never did them again in the 4 years of school in a class. At least other schools have to pass pharm tests with 90% or 100% - we never had that.
RedCell
436 Posts
Although the recently graduated culturally sensitive nurse might not recognize why Old Man River's, with the T-3 transection, gets bradycardic and hypertensive as hell after pushing 80mg of furosemide for his fulminant pulmonary edema...atleast he/she can probably define ethnocentrism much more accurately than the diploma nurse who knows to unkink the catheter.
mskate, you might be on to something.