What's a good way to review med-surg & pharm?

[Hellostudentnurssee]

I was accepted to a nursing program that was funded by 2 schools. Let's say you have "school A" & "school B". We just found out a few months back that school A and B parted ways. We've been under "school b" for the first half of the program and now that they're broken up, us students will have to go to "school A". School A is more strict (while School B had a strict but "motherly" approach). Next quarter will be fast and furious. I felt incredibly slow learning med surg and pharmacology and I don't think I even remember all the drugs I've studied. Our schedule will continue with med surg again and I was wondering if there was a more fun or easier way to review med surg and pharmacology?

Thanks!

[ChuckeRN, BSN, RN]

Re: Pharmacology

You're never going to know ALL of the drugs you learned about. The best you can do is figure out the catagory/class of drugs they are and what the general side effects are or even what organ it affects. For example, does a drug cause liver toxicity or kidney damage?

[wooh, BSN, RN]

Yeah, for pharm, learn your drug classes, then learn a few popular drugs for each class.

For med-surg, think of it as the big picture of each disease category. For lung stuff, what will you do and more importantly, understand WHY you do certain things. That will help when you move to the next category and you wonder why you aren't doing those things.

And I've plugged it a few times here, but I can't recommend enough David Woodruff's teaching materials at ed4nurses dot com. His med/surg basics stuff is great. I used his stuff to study for my m/s certification and wished I'd discovered it in school. He's really great at explaining things so that it becomes a part of you instead of like most of what I learned in school which was long enough to test, then it's way back in the rear of my brain, rarely seen or used again. :)