Teaching Pharm-I need your input

Achoo!, LPN · Jul 11, 2006

Powerpoints helped me alot. We were able to print them off the school website and then add our own notes to them. It helped condense things into an easier to study format.

Good luck with your teaching! :)

Mandarella · Jul 11, 2006

Powerpoints helped me alot. We were able to print them off the school website and then add our own notes to them. It helped condense things into an easier to study format.
Good luck with your teaching! :)

:yeahthat: :yeahthat:

Power points were a life saver. We would get them before class and follow along, had areas to make notes on the sides.

Nursehelge · Jul 11, 2006

I took Pharm last semester. My teacher was great. She gave examples of drugs from T.V. commercials, she used personal stories, she used powerpoints. The book was EXCELLENT. "Pharmacology for nursing care" by Lehne, elsevier/saunders. She gave extra credit if we memorized important charts in the book and other important things. We had 4 tests, and a comprehensive final. She made sure we knew what we would be tested on a few days before each test---

mandana · Jul 11, 2006

I loved pharm for a couple of reasons:

My professor really grouped things well and taught what was different about certain meds. So, for example, with cardiac meds he'd just briefly indicate the same effects of beta blockers and calcium channel blockers but he'd explain in detail what made them different. He was also really great about teaching tricks so that if you didn't recognize the specific name of a drug you might be able to identify the class by the name - like beta blockers ending in "lol".

There's my 2 cents - grouping, focusing on what's different, and hints for recognizing med classes based on the drug name.

Oh...he also made us make drug cards for pretty much every med - both names, classification, usual dosage, MOA, desired effect, and major SE's. I've used these same drug cards throughout nursing school and they've been great.

Good luck,

Amanda

Bala Shark · Jul 11, 2006

Well, some instructors lecture on stuff that is not going to be on the test...If you can lecture about stuff that is going to be on the test plus things that are not going to be on the test, that would be fine..Present your information in a broad form covering a lot of areas..Also, on the exams, make a small percentage of stuff that you did not cover so you know the students are reading the book also..

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Jul 11, 2006

i'm an rn of 30 years who has been recently working in medical coding and going back to school to learn health information management. part of the medical coding involved learning basic pharmacology and we were required to use the following textbook: pharmacology: an introduction by henry hitner and barbar t. nagle ($74.75) which you can see at

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0073122750&txt=y&itm=1

you can look at the table of contents by clicking on the link for this on the right side of the page. you can get an idea of how they have broken down the drugs down by categories.

understand that this pharmacology was for medical coders who merely need to recognize the names of medications and what they are used for as they are reviewing charts. for example, in the book, a chapter will introduce the central nervous system and do a very quick review of the anatomy. it then has successive chapters on sedatives, antipsychotics, antidepressants, psychomimetrics, antiepileptics and antiparkinsonians. they only give the basics of how these drugs work and they may include a table of the commonly prescribed drugs in those particular categories. this was a very basic survey course.

i would imagine your choice would be how much more difficult to make the curriculum. we did not have to make med cards, but this was for coding so the kinds of things you put on med cards is not something that is of interest to medical coders.

many years ago in my basic nursing program we played medication bingo. we had bingo cards with the names of drugs or classifications of drugs on them. we would pull out the names of drugs (generic or brand name) from a fishbowl and cover up the appropriate matching square on the bingo card. winners got things like bags of chips or candy bars. i would imagine you could also design medication jeopardy, millionaire and family feud with a little creativity.

here is a website i found not too long ago that list drugs by category along with a lot of other goodies that i have been listing on posts about pharmacology

http://www.globalrph.com/ - has drug listings, instructions for iv dilutions in mixing piggyback meds, you can search for specific drugs (uses rxlist.com), or chose the drug table button to get lists of medications arranged by categories. clicking on the infectious disease button takes you to an infectious disease database arranged by disease which give you listings of antibiotic choices that can be used for treatment. there are a number of medical calculators here including one to calculate drip rates on some of the commonly used icu medications. there are also links to a video library.

this is a med card constructor that students might find helpful (at least they don't have to handwrite the cards) http://www.edruginfo.com/qthome.htm - e-druginfo.com's gateway page into medi-quik construct-a-card. you need to register, but it's free. you have to input all the information yourself. this constructor merely prints it onto a pre-formatted form. in playing around with the constructor i found that you could not go back otherwise you lost your input data. i was able to shrink the finished card down to about 7" x 5" but my printer didn't print any border, or perhaps i just didn't know how to apply a border or shrink the card down smaller.

i have many, many other pharmacology and drug links that i would be happy to share with you as you set up the curriculum for your class. it might be easier for me to just sent you the word files that i keep the links and their descriptions in via e-mail. pm me if you want to have these.

GratefulHeart · Jul 11, 2006

I agree that Powerpoint lectures available as handout downloads were very helpful. If you have control over the text used, I think a well written book makes a difference as well. We used Pharmacology and the Nursing Process published by Mosby, which has a study guide that accompanies it, which assisted by narrowing my attention to the key information.

Perhaps most helpful of all for me was a list of learning objectives the instructor gave us for each chapter, which I used to create my own study sheets (including info from both lecture notes and the text). That strategy seems to work best for me regardless of the class...

HididiScribbler · Jul 12, 2006

Having powerpoint slides to follow along with is very helpful IF the lecturer actually follows them. There've been times when we've gotten them to follow along with, but the lecturer doesn't follow them, and then...what's the use?

At the same time, it also bugs me when the instructors just read off of the Power Point (we may as well take it and read it at home!) Having just the basic info on Power Point and then lecturing off of that is so much more helpful...

Using a lot of pictures is always a good idea for use visual thinkers... (diagrams of how processes work) and examples are great for making sure people remember side effects, etc. of drugs...

I guess I'd just say...do your best to make it interesting and organized. Most of all, make sure your students know that you're avaliable for questions. Having an approachable teacher makes all the difference.

Sheri257 · Jul 12, 2006

Ah ... a chance to actually make suggestions to a teacher ...

These are general suggestions but would eliminate a lot problems for students:

1) Please be organized. If you tell us that something is not going to be on a test then please make a note of it somewhere and don't forget what you told us. There's nothing worse than seeing something you told us not to study ... on a test. And, on the flip side, if we need to study something ... tell us. We can't read your mind. For some reason many teachers expect you to know things that are not mentioned in lecture or in the assigned reading material.

2) Read the textbook and make sure you're reading the same edition we're reading. Too often the teachers base their test equestions on some old version of a textbook when we can only buy the new version where key material has changed ... or has been omitted all together.

3) If you're teaching pharm chances are it's first semester students who have no clue what nursing critical thinking questions are like. Recommend NCLEX guides or other critical thinking practice questions to help them along. Too many teachers don't give us any instruction with critical thinking at all ... they just expect you to figure it out after the test.

4) If you assign more than one source of reading material, try to realize that different textbooks tell us different things. Three different textbooks can easily give you three different answers to the same question. If there is conflicting information, tell us what book we should rely upon for test questions.

5) If you're going to use test banks or questions from other sources that are not from our textbooks, please be aware that the conflicting information problem occurs here also. Our textbook can easily say something different than what a test bank compiled from other sources says. It's incredibly frustrating.

If you could do this then ... it would be wonderful.

:typing

EricJRN, MSN, RN · Jul 12, 2006

Ah ... a chance to actually make suggestions to a teacher ...

Nice, isn't it? Jackmac, I think you're off to a great start. It wouldn't even dawn on most new instructors to solicit the type of feedback that you have.

JACKMAC · Jul 12, 2006

A BIG thank you to all of you for your input. I am finding it very helpful. Keep it coming.

Thanks!!!