APRIL 19 LIVE SHOW | The Nursing School Show | ASK US ANYTHING!

Good morning.

Good morning, everyone. Happy Wednesday.

Welcome to the nursing school.

We missed out a couple days ago, but we are back.

We are back.

We are back. So welcome to the nursing school show. We are going to answer your questions about med surg.

Actually, we had some questions last week about med surg. We were getting into them on Monday, and we were not here on Monday. Yes.

All right. So we are not here on Monday because we were sick. We are not sick anymore.

We were not sick. The baby was sick. Yes, but same thing.

Same thing. But we are back. So we are talking med surg, right?

Yes.

Okay, so for those who are joining, we are talking med surg, and we're talking about nursing school, and we're talking about your nursing school questions.

Hello, Pierce Spice. Good morning.

Good. All right. If you have any questions regarding nursing school, school or any concerns or crazes.

Questions or comments.

Questions. Comments, sure.

What advice can you give about peas? We should talk about. Well, okay, we're gonna talk about this because it kind of dovetails into med surg a lot more than you think it does, my friend. So this will be a really good one.

All right, so stick around. We're going to talk about med surge, which essentially is talking about peads, too.

Yep. And a lot of things.

So stick around.

Stick around.

It's gonna be great. Hey.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Hey, by the way, Bonnie. Hi. Hello, Bonnie. Good morning. By the way, this is Matthew.

Hi.

And I'm Christina. And we never introduce ourselves.

We never do.

We just.

We assume that you guys know us. But that is not good. We should say hi more often. Yes.

Oh, boy.

Christina is the nurse. For those that did not know, I am the not nurse. For those that did not know, I.

Am the not nurse. We get questions all the time.

So. Yes, but we're talking med surg. We're talking peds. If you guys have any other questions regarding nursing school, pop them in the comments below.

Okay, so who's in med surg right now? Who's in fundamentals? Where are we at? Yes.

Where is everyone at? On.

Where are we at in life right now?

April. Middle of April. Can you believe that? Middle of April.

We're just getting ready for finals. Because it's about. If you're in a semester school, you're about two weeks out from finals. Yes. And here's what I want to say about that. Start studying now for final exams.

If you haven't. If you haven't yet.

If you have not started studying, start studying now for finals. Okay? It's. They're coming and they're coming in hot.

Okay.

I'm taking farm and fundamentals.

Bonnie, you're in Med Surg. Bloom, you. You just went through for Med Surge.

Yeah, Med Surge is one of those things that is so nursing school kind of gets progressively more challenging. Med Surg is kind of where that happens.

And it's kind of interesting too. It definitely. You can see a building on each other, right?

Yeah.

Let us know if you notice that. That what you learned last semester is kind of what you're building on this semester. So they are building blocks. You build on the knowledge that you've already gone through.

Yep, that's right. So I'm about to go to term four or five. I'm about to take peds in Med Search too. A lot of people in Med Surg too.

Okay. Med Surg two. And we're talking about peds too. Or we will be. So.

Yeah. What do you guys study? So our Med Surge two, I want to say it was. Let's see, I think we did cardiac, respiratory, renal, and GI in Med Surge one. Or was that Med Surge two? So I can't even remember. But then you get into like you. Yeah, I think that was Med Surge one. And the like Med Surge two was maybe endocrine. Oh, yeah, that's what it was. It was endocrine, neuro, perhaps a little bit of neuro. But you do kind of get like it progresses like we said, you know, it does tend to get a little more challenging as you go through like Med Surg 1, Med Surg 2, Med Surg 3, all of those things. Oh, cancer, yeah. Oncology, hematology. You're right. I think that's what we did in Med Surg too. So like endocrine, definitely. Hematology, oncology. Oh, infections. Infectious, yes, all of that. I feel like I need immunological stuff.

I feel like I need a 10 hour refresher course before taking this exam this week. Doesn't that feel like it a lot of the times that. But yeah, that's a good thing about starting early and just kind of building on it and critically thinking.

And Bonnie, inside the nursing SOS membership community, we have that 10 hour refresher course for you so you can watch all of the videos on all of the topics that you are studying for. For your exams. So we have all those videos there for you. Don't forget about that. Okay. So we're basically your crash course and we tell you like, we teach you everything you have to know about nursing school to pass your exams. So that you're not having to figure it out yourself because you don't have to figure it out yourself. Right. Like you do not have to stress or worry or read everything in the textbook or you know, all of the, all of the things that everyone else is doing in nursing school and is really causing them to struggle. Like that is. Isn't that so interesting that like the standard for nursing school is struggling. So interesting. Right. Like let's not do that. Okay. Vonnie? Yeah. You just go to your dashboard, click through whatever course, like whatever you're studying. If you're studying cardiac, if you're studying fundamentals, if you're studying fluids in electrolytes, just click on the courses inside the community.

Yeah, so when you come up to the membership community forum on the left hand side, there is a link for the dashboard and if you do that it will open up another window or something, another tab, what have you, and then it will have basically the little icons for each of the courses. So if you're doing cardiac, for example, you just scroll down, find cardiac, go in there and then all the, all the different disorders that we have for cardiac are in there in our four core method.

Yep.

So all in there.

That's interesting. Carolyn, I'm curious, you took GI without renal. That's so fascinating to me. I guess like if you do renal, maybe with more fluids and electrolytes, that makes sense. But I'm curious why Med Surg1 did not include renal with GI and especially cardiac and all that. Super curious about that. Actually. That's a question I would like to ask your school. Of course I can't. We are doing fabulous this morning. Thank you for asking. Okay, so there are a few really important study models that you need to be using when you are studying in nursing school. Okay. We walk you through them inside the nursing school study system. Nursing SOS members, you have access to this. It is in your dashboard. So when you go into the community, click on. Just like Matthew said, click on course dashboard. You will see the area for the study system. Okay. The nursing school study system is your step by step guide through nursing school. And we walk you through it starts on page 25. The study models. These you absolutely must know and must use in nursing school if you want to pass your exams with confidence and, and actually be able to understand the content that you are learning about. It's very easy in nursing school to take the way that you were studying from anatomy and physiology, microbiology, biology, chemistry, all of those things, statistics, and take that into nursing school and it Will not work like your study methods for your prereqs will break when you get to nursing school. They do not translate. They do not work in nursing school. You have to come up with a new way of studying, and that's exactly what we give you in the nursing SOS membership community. So you've got these study models. So what they are is the four core method, which tells you exactly how to study and what to focus your study time on so you're not wasting time on things that don't matter. Okay? That is the name of the game. Things move too fast in nursing school for you to try to study everything about everything. Right? So use our four core method inside the membership community, okay. To focus your study time. And then we have our pharm force. So if you're in pharmacology right now, pharmacology really dovetails a lot into med surge. Obviously, you have to make sure that you know your medications for your med surg exams. Like they really, they go hand in hand because a lot of the nursing interventions that you'll see. Yes. Tomorrow. Exactly. Pharmacology and pathophysiology, those are foundational for med surg. You have to be able to understand both of those things to pass your med surg exams. Okay. Because you're going to be tested on them in med surg, not just farm, not just in your patho class. Med surg is where everything kind of comes together. So the farm four is going to walk you through, through exactly what to study in pharmacology, how to learn your meds faster. A lot of nursing students, we find just try to memorize everything out of the drug guide. Not helpful for you. You cannot just memorize a list of side effects. It is not the way to do it. Because when you get to your exam, you are going to really struggle on the critical thinking piece. If you try to memorize stuff, okay, you, you cannot do that. Like, that is just setting yourself up for failure for your exam. Don't do that to yourself. Okay. You have to take that next step, be able to critically think and apply the information that you are learning about. So that is really the four core method and the farm for method. So you really want to use those two in tandem to make sure that you're focusing on the right things. And then we also have our DRC critical thinking model. So, yeah, check that out inside the community. Okay. Yep.

Study style. I saw that coming through, definitely. So, yeah, when going through nursing school, a lot of times they'll. They'll say for you to take some exams to kind of find your learning style. Vark is a very popular one. But just the general idea that different people learn different ways and you need to find the way that you learn best so you can efficiently study.

And I think that's it too. Like, that is a big, big thing, I think. So often we look at students who are successful in class and we say, oh, they're being successful studying that way, so I should study that way too. But that might not work best for you. Right? So if you like. For me personally, I'm very auditory. I am. I like visual things, sure. But like, I just remember more what I hear. So if I could record lecture, that would change everything because I can just go back and listen to it, right? Or like just listen to videos. I, I very rarely even watch videos on YouTube because I don't. I'm not very visual. I listen to them. So I pull up YouTube videos and I listen instead of watch them. Kind of interesting. So like, but other students in your class might be more visual. They might learn better through pictures or by actually doing skills. Like I had a friend in nursing school who was fabulous at clinical skills and she would just go to skills lab, go to clinical and rock it. Like that's how she learned best, was by actually doing it. So everyone learns differently. So when you're in med surg especially like, it's, it's not helpful to try to learn, like pigeonhole yourself and learn in a way that your other classmates are learning because that might not work best for you. Does that make sense?

And just knowing how you study goes a long way. So Carolyn, you were saying that you, you actually have multiple study styles, and I think that's probably pretty accurate across the board. Is that depending on what you're doing, some things could work better than other things. So yeah, but knowing that some things are different, instead of saying that, oh, I need to watch everything when sometimes that's not true. So understanding that is just a great first step on studying more efficiently.

And that's why we have the community too, because so many students don't learn best from reading a textbook. Like you. You can read a textbook all day long. That's not going to help you critically think for most students. Right. So that's why, like the step by step videos inside the community, the study guides, like all the visual stuff, we give you all the auditory stuff. That is really the name of the game. If you're not, like, if, if reading a textbook is not how you learn best, then you have to figure out another way because that's just not an efficient way for you to study. If you try to study via a textbook, you're just going to waste time. And that's really the thing when you, when you talk about like what's, what's your best way of learning? It's all about efficiency. Like sure, you can beat yourself into learning and reading a textbook, but it's probably going to take you double or triple the time than if you had just tried to learn it a different way. Yeah, that works best for you.

The way that works best for you. Uh, now this kind of leads a little bit into Matt's question when taking the NCLEX exam. Should we need to learn all the diseases? So that's a lot of diseases, like.

All of them in the entire world. That, that's like asking, that's. Yeah, that's like saying you would have to know everything in the drug Ed. And you just can't, you simply cannot, you simply cannot know all of that.

And again, that goes back to how we learn and how we, how we teach in the membership community is really, you need to make that leap. What that question is telling me is that you're trying to figure out what do I need to memorize in order to do well on nclex? But there's so many diseases out there, there's so many things that they could possibly ask that you cannot ever learn everything in the whole world, which is essentially what you're asking. So you do need to make that leap from simple memorization to critical thinking to be able to understand a general pathophysiology, even if you've never heard of it and understand how that's affecting the body. And then from that, critically think, okay, if that's how it's affecting the body, this would be what the signs and symptoms are.

Right?

This would be what I'd have to do as a nurse to assess them. These are the interventions that we'll need to do. But you can only do that with things that you've never heard of. If you just understand the critical thinking and the basis of how to study and how to learn all this material.

Here's a great example. Hyperthyroid versus hypothyroid. And this happens a lot, you can say like right sided heart failure versus left sided heart failure. Oftentimes like with disorders or diseases, there's like two aspects. A lot of times, just like Matthew was just saying once you know, the pathophysiology. So let's say hyperthyroid versus Hypothyroid. So once you know the pathophysiology of the thyroid hormone, it's a. Think of it as either speeding up or slowing down the metabolism of the body. So thyroid hormone, when you think thyroid, think metabolism. Okay? So just like Matthew was saying, once you know the pathophysiology of what like, actually is happening in the body at that, like, physiological level, then you can critically think through everything else. So, Matt, you're asking, do I need to know all the diseases? No, but you do have to know the pathophysiology behind them so that you can critically think on the exam. So if you understand, if you're being tested on thyroid disorders, hyperthyroid, hypothyroid, once you know what the thyroid hormone does, you're able to more critically think through the signs and symptoms. You might see the nursing assessment and the nursing intervention. So this is what we walk you through inside that community, inside the four core method. It all starts with the pathophysiology. You have to start there because it's the foundation for everything else that you need to know in nursing school about your disorders. Okay, Tamara, great question. What do I need to know about antibiotics for my exam coming up on Friday? You need to know the mechanism of action of antibiotics. What do they actually do? Okay. And then what could the side effects be of that based on what they do in the body?

Yep. So for our four core, the base is a pathophysiology for diseases. You need to know what's going wrong in the body first, and then you can critically think about everything else.

Yes.

For pharmacology, mechanism, action is the base. Same thing is the foundation. So you need to learn that first, and then everything kind of branches off of that.

Yes. You have to understand. So for our. Our farm for strategy, this is what we teach in the nursing SS membership community. The farm for. What do you have to focus on for pharmacology? Well, the mechanism of action that is foundational. You have to understand, Tamara, what the mechanism of action of antibiotics are. What does it do in the body? Okay, and then, Matt, for diseases or disorders, for med surg. And we had that question earlier. What about pediatrics? Pediatrics?

Pediatrics is the same. Same.

It's the same thing. Same thing because it's all disorders. Infectious diseases, met psychiatric. Same thing. Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression. What is going on in the body? It all starts, you guys, with the pathophysiology. You have to understand the pathophysiology of what is actually happening. So let's say you're taking a pediatrics exam and you're learning about congenital heart defects, okay? Vsd, asd, all of the things that you have to understand, okay, where are the holes in the heart? Where's the blood moving? You have to understand the pathophysiology behind it, okay? To actually understand the signs and symptoms that you might see. Same thing with a nursing assessment. Same thing with the nursing interventions. They're going to be different for an ASD versus a VSD in congenital heart defects, okay? So atrial septal defect and ventricular septal defect. If you were confused on those, ASD and vsd, okay, Same thing. Like we said, hyper and hypothyroid or stroke is another good example because there's so many different types, right? You could have a hemorrhagic stroke, thrombotic stroke, embolic stroke. I mean, there's so many different types of strokes and they're treated very differently. Like, you're, you're not gonna, you're not gonna give a thrombolytic or a, like TPA to a patient with a hemorrhagic stroke because they're going to die, okay? Like, we don't do that. You have to understand the pathophysiology behind things because the nursing assessments, the nursing interventions are very, very different. Okay? It all starts with the patho and so with, then with the pharmacology, right? Tomorrow, like you were asking, with antibiotics. It all starts with the mechanism of action. So that's our pharm4 method. So if you're a nursing SS member, you've got to check this out. We just put this up a couple of weeks ago. The brand new nursing school study system literally walks you through step by step, all of these study models. So they start on page 25. So check that out. It's in your dashboard. Just click on course dashboard and then study system. You'll see it there. It's fabulous. It's a fabulous resource for you to walk you through exactly how those work together. The path to the signs and symptoms, to the nursing assessment, to the nursing interventions. From pharmacology, you've got the mechanism of action. How does the medication act in the body? Okay, then to the side effects. How do those side effects relate to that mechanism of action, the nursing assessment. What are you going to assess for nursing considerations? What. How are you going to give the medication? Okay, Are you going to give potassium through an IV push? Well, no, because you understand the mechanism of action of potassium. Okay? These are the things that you have to Be thinking through. All right. And so often the problem is that nursing students try to memorize a list of signs and symptoms or a list of side effects. But then you get to your exam, and what they have on the exam is not exactly what you memorized, and you're screwed. That's not helpful. Right. You're going to get it wrong because you don't understand the pathophysiology or the mechanism of action behind it. You don't understand the critical thinking behind it. But once you understand that, then they can give you a list of signs and symptoms all day. You'll be like, oh, yeah, that would make sense, but this one doesn't. That one makes sense, but this one doesn't. You see what I'm saying? It really will help you watch a lot.

It's really all about connection, and everything connects together. If you try and memorize just lists in silos separate from each other, then it's not going to help you because you don't have that idea of where it's connecting. Okay. What's going wrong in the body? That means that this sign and symptom will appear. Well, if you just have this list of signs and symptoms of like five or six or whatever, and there's. On the exam, there's the seven or eighth that you've never heard of.

Yes.

If you know the patho, you can figure out, okay, that could. That that would make sense.

I mean, they might be wrong.

Yeah, it might be wrong.

But you have to critically think through them.

Yes. And critically think through them. But if you just have that list, then there's. There's nothing that you can work with. It's just, okay, these are the five I know. I don't know why I know them, but I know them.

Yes. And that's not helpful. And then what often happens while we hear this a lot with students? Like, I can't keep things straight. If you're finding yourself not being able to keep things straight in med surg. In. Well, nursing school in general. Right. The. The pharmacology, all the meds that you have to know. If you can't keep things straight, my guess is you're trying to memorize stuff. Like you're trying to memorize a list of side effects of two different medications, and you can't keep them straight because you don't understand what they actually do individually. Does that make sense?

Matt was asking psychiatric nursing tips.

So again, yeah, that's what I touched on. It was. It's the mental health, like the bipolar. Like, what I said, Matt, is the depression and bipolar, like it's all the same. It's, it's that four core method. You have to understand the pathophysiology behind it.

What's. What's happening in the body that's causing it to happen. And then I, I know with a psychiatric nursing also there, there's a big focus on again, pharmacology, which is again, the, the, the Farm for method also helps there again, the basis of that is the mechanism of action. So, okay, this psychiatric med, well, what is it doing in the body? Yes, and it's, it's still all the same. It's the same as anything else. People want to say that it's, oh, it's different. It's the brain or. Oh, it's a psychiatry. Psychiatry is different. No, it's, It's.

It's.

It's all the same.

Yep, it really is. It's. It is interesting. And, and mental health specifically is very, very medication focused. Pharmacology focus. So Matt, when you're studying mental health in nursing school, medications are going to be huge. So just like Matthew said, mechanism of action, focus on those Farm for. Get inside the nursing office membership committee. We have an entire medication database for you that walks you through everything you have to know for your medications so that you're not wasting time learning things that don't matter. That is the key. So I mean, that's just. That is the key in nursing school. That's the name of the game. If you're wasting time studying, you're gonna set yourself up for major issues on your exam. Okay? It's not, it's not helpful for you. You have to actually focus your study time on the things that matter, which is exactly what we teach inside the community.

And that leads up to Tamara's question of what does it mean when someone tells you to know the drug classes, which is something we tell you to do is to study by drug classes. So what does that mean?

I'll be right back. Good setup. Thank you. So, Tamara, the medication classes, you are exactly correct. You need to study your medications in classes, in groups, not individually. That is a huge key for pharmacology. When you are trying to understand medications individually. It's wasting time. Okay, so this is exactly what we teach inside the Farm for method in the community. You have to break your medications up into pharmacologic or therapeutic class, because here's why. The mechanism of action of a class, it'll be the same. So if you know two medications belong to the same drug Class, they will have the same or similar mechanism of action, which means their side effects are going to be very similar. The nursing assessments you're going to do are going to be very similar. The nursing considerations that you need to know going to be very similar. There is no point to you trying to learn them individually. Learning them together as a group is the name of the game because it's literally going to cut your study time in half. Literally. Like when we. So inside the community and with our farm flashcards, we have actually specifically inside our farm flashcards, we give you the individual medications, but we also break them down by class for you. Literally it's like a third. So there are like a third of the drug classes that you need to know as opposed to the 120 plus medications individually. So what, there's like 30 some classes?

Yes, there are 30 odd classes and there's over 120 meds.

So it's like a quarter.

Would you rather a quarter of the work? Would you rather have to just math learn every single thing about all 120 plus or. Since you can group them into 30 some groups and all the groups or all the medications in a group work pretty much the same way?

Yes.

Then you cut your work.

It changes everything.

Yeah, it cuts your work down by a lot.

Yeah. So Tamara, what you're looking for is the pharmacologic or therapeutic class. Okay. Someone asked when the membership was going to be open. We just released the date for it yesterday.

Oh, did you?

On Instagram. I did. May 7th. Okay, I did not know that. Oh, Matthew did not know that. Okay, sorry. May 7th is when the community is opening again.

Cool.

May 7th. Okay, so it's like three weeks away.

So mark your calendars or Alternatively go to nursingschoolofsuccess.com join and join the wait list, VIP list. The list there. You'll be the first to know.

Yeah. And that is the way to get in. Like you get on that wait list because you don't want to miss it. We have students all the time saying like, I didn't know it was open because you weren't on the waitlist. Okay. Make sure you are on that list. All right. Get on the list. So you will be notified when enrollment opens because you do not want to miss it. All right. So completely. I just. Yeah, it's just completely insane. Actually, something that students have been asking us a lot lately is. Wait, you do that? Yes. We help nursing students pass nursing school in amazing ways. So not only do you get hundreds of step by step Nursing lectures, like, where we literally teach you step by step, everything you need to know. But also we coach you in real time on video. Okay? So, like, we have coaching calls where you can join and come up on video with me and we can talk through things like if you're feeling burnt out or anxious or if you're procrastinating and you don't know why, things like that. Like, I can help you stay focused in nursing school. We have coaching calls, we have tutoring calls. Okay, so where you can come on, literally, and talk to our nursing tutors. Like, this is so, so fabulous. Where we literally come alongside you, we hold your hand through nursing school. So it's just kind of a funny. A funny thing students have asked us lately is like, wait, you actually do all that? Yes, we do. So not only do you get all those, like, step by step nursing lecture videos and the cheat sheets and the study guides and all that, but also you get a whole lot of hand holding along the way because we are 100% here for you. Like, you can reach out anytime. We've got our tutor form, We've got our tutor calls. We've got the coaching calls. We've got our community calls. There's like, we're just always here. It's pretty great. You are going to absolutely love it. So join May 7th.

May 7th. So it is coming up.

You want to be confident in nursing school. Like, this is the way to do it.

There is a lot there for you.

Yep.

Yes. So nursing school success dot com. Join will and then fill up the. The list there to get on the VIP list.

Yes.

And yeah, you'll be notified next Monday.

I want to talk about fun fundamentals. We haven't talked about that in the past several weeks, actually, on one of these lives. So let's talk about fundamentals on Monday. Okay? Everyone cool with that?

All right. Sounds good.

Good. All right, we will see you guys on Monday.

Take care, everyone.

Bye. Have a great rest of your Wednesday and a great week. Bye.