What's your ESSENTIALS?

I'm not a nurse yet, just a nursing student.

I will say that my "everyday carry" includes 2 pens: Pilot Frixion 4 color refillable pen (erasable), and a Pilot G2 extra fine black pen for anything that needs a legal signature.

I'm a nurse of 23 years, currently a dialysis clinic manager. I have worked ER, ICU, Med/Surg, Home Health, Hospice, and LTC

Get cheap pens- they walk off and get lost daily

Wear good, appropriate for setting, shoes. This varies by brand and expense for everyone

Support stockings, whether you are male or female. Believe me, they make the difference

You will find the other things that work for you as you go. What you consider necessity, I may not and vice versa

Tip-be open to all reasonable advice when you start orientation. If you don't understand why you're being told to do something a certain way, ask! Be open to admitting not knowing something. People love teaching! Just make sure they know the rationale of what/ why of the info that they give!

Good luck on your new journey

I'm in psych. I keep a black pen & notepad. In my notepad I keep things I have to do during the day so if someone is calling me to do something else or a patient gets out of line I can go take care of whatever and return to my duties. I also keep in my notepad questions about any medications I want to ask the doctors about like why they gave it etc.

When I was a new grad (acute care, still in acute care, same unit, telemetry), I always brought a clip board and my favorite 4 colored pen. After about 6 months, gave up on the pen. Ending up "misplacing" it every time. After about a year, stopped using the clip board as it became obnoxious to carry around. Not to mention, all the nasty stuff that can and will get on it as you go from room to room.

Nowadays, all I need is my patient printout sheet, black pen (my unit stockpiles loads of them), and my stethoscope. I used to always carry notes on labs and some med information on my clipboard, but now that phones are somewhat "more acceptable" (at least in my setting), there's no reason to carry a clip board. Personally, it feels clunky and obnoxious bringing in personal things into a patient room aside from the essentials (stethoscope, flushes, etc).

I'm still in nursing school, but I have an app that is really helpful in clinical - Nursing Central. I have a 2 year subscription and can load it on multiple devices. On my phone it automatically updates. Last term, the nurse I was working with in clinical told me to use Nursing Central to look up all the patient's meds and our lab teacher told us to use the dosage calculator because that's what they do at work (after we passed our dose calc test, of course)...

It has: a dosage calculator, Davis drug guide, Taber's medical dictionary, Davis lab & diagnostic tests, and some other stuff. I mostly use the drug guide because I may know a few key points about a drug, but the app knows so much more! It is a lot of info that is small/portable and pretty well up to date.

I always bring a small flashlight with me since a work night shift and so I don't have to turn up the lights just to check on them.

Stethoscope, clip board, my 5 in 1 pen, white board marker and a bandage scissor.