Your Pre-Clinicals Book Recommendations, Please...

[Havin' A Party!, ASN, RN]

Hi, folks!

Would much appreciate your thoughts / comments on this. Will be out of school between the middle of March and September, when I begin the clinical nursing program. (Due to my background, only had to complete A & P I and II as prereq's, and the latter concludes in three weeks.)

Thought I'd self-study several books in the above interim. Was considering hitting the Fundamentals of Nursing, Med / Surg, and Drug Calc's books.

Wanted your advice on what you think would be the most helpful / useful for me in my first year of the nursing program.

A little about me: I'm an older student, who is switching careers after a downsizing. (For years I've wanted to get into health care, but the job loss accelerated my plan.) Have a BS in engineering and a MS in management.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[proud2basn]

Learn your lab values. If you get those down now before you start, you won't have to worry about memorizing them when you are trying to memorize a thousand other things! Learn the serum electrolyte values, WBC, RBC, Hamoglobin and Hematocrit, BUN and Creatinine, and the urinalysis values. It will help!

[JacelRN, BSN, RN]

Hi Larry,

I'm going to assume you don't have to do all your pre-reqs because you already have a bachelor's degree, but the first year of nursing school is usually just that with a little added theory and community nursing classes. For this reason, you many have to endure classes like nutrition, fundamentals of nursing (like you mentioned) and your science classes like chemistry. If you don't need these, then ignore my first paragraph.

If this is the case and you really want to dive into the books, I would recommend learning your nursing assessment and drug calculations. Inspection, Auscultation, Palpation, Percussion, etc. These all have techniques that the instructors will beat into you. The more you have an understanding of these, the smoother your assessment class will go. And it will help you understand some disease processes better when you learn them. Also, drug calcs were a problem for me since I'm a left-brain kind of learner so if you're great at math, just review. Otherwise, find a good med-calculation workbook and work on some of the formulas. That can also give you a heads up.

Overall, each school is different in what they teach so you might even be able to ask for a syllabus for your upcoming sememster and read ahead. Then if you have further questions, research a bit further.

Good Luck to you in your new career as a student and a nurse :balloons:

JacelRN

[MikeLPN]

Nurse's Pocket Companion from Springhouse. Lippincott or Springhouse drug guide. Nursing Diagnosis Handbook (Ackley/Ludwig), Mosby. Would probably do for RN clinicals also.

[Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN]

A current book featuring nursing diagnoses and rationales.