Drug Cards

[Buttercup]

Our clinical instructor wants us to make our own drug cards, but didn't include anything that we NEED to have on those cards. Anyone have suggestions?

[cougarnurse]

Interactions with other drugs, and side effects are good ideas.

'Cat'

[Aaron C.]

writing drug cards was the worst thing EVER.

Our clinical instructor was hard core!

It would take me a good 12 hours to do my drug cards for the next day and the care plan. We'd get done at like 8pm at the hospital, and have to be back to the hospital at 2 with care plan and drug cards ready.

Then she'd quiz us on the drug cards. If you didn't have everything done, she would just send you home.

One drug card would take me probably 10-15 mins, and that was half assing them. I remember one time I had 22 drugs for the next day. Thankfully, I had some of them already done from before.

The thing that sucked about drug cards was that we had to not only write the drug cards on our own, crediting sources, but we had to memorize them, AND do the care plan.

The care plan was hard because we had to site sources out of a book, but it couldn't be a care plan book!!!!!!! It's really easy to find info about hand washing, for instance, but some things were brutal as heck.

It was ALL BUSY WORK.

I'll never understand the need for the busy work. It wasn't learning, it was scouring pages of a book to find a page number to add to the info you already know by heart.

If you're gonna require that, at least let us have the rest of the clinical rotation to finish it, rather than 16 hours after you just got your patient.

I understand needing to know it to take care of them, but there were a couple of times when I didn't even go to bed in between. THAT was definitely not good for anybody.

I loved my clinical instructor. She could give you a living breathing example for just about any medical condition you could think of. She was a very intelligent lady who was very good at what she did. But the DRUG CARDS and care plans could have been better served with less busy work and more...anything but drug cards.

And I'm an lpn, so most of that seemed pointless anyway. :39: I haven't done a care plan since :houra:

:luck: