Preparing for Second Semester of Nursing

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Hello to everyone at allnurses.com

I'm going into my second semester of nursing in the end of August. Our 1st semester professor gave us the drug list for next semester. It's over 100 meds. I'm wondering if I should start doing drug cards for the meds or should I wait until my 2nd semester professor tells us what drugs we should focus on.

Can anyone give me advice? What did you guys do? Some previous students that moved on from 2nd semester said that I should wait, but I don't know. I just want to be prepared :wink2:

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Specializes in Chiropractic assistant, CNA in LTC, RN.

I bought a nice, little packet of drug cards, a pretty little binder, wrote up about 6 drugs and then got so bogged down with studying that I never wrote anymore. Never needed them either. I should mention that I am not a flashcard type person. They just don't help me. That being said, if you find flashcards helpful then by all means use the drug cards.

If the drug cards are mandatory, I would do all 100 drugs IF you have the time to do them. If not, you could email your instructor and ask him/her what drugs to focus on. Nursing school requires a ton of work and the adage "work smart not hard" is certainly true here.

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Don't do the drug cards unless you really have to. We had around 40-50 for Childbearing--and I did them all--then never used them. Huge waste of time!

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

you might want to compare the drugs on your list to the top 200 drugs on rxlist.com (http://www.rxlist.com/) and make cards for those drugs now to save yourself some time. eventually, you are going to have patients getting the drugs listed on rx list.com.

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Thank you all for your advice!

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