Christina Rafano tells nursing students to stop memorizing medications one by one. Instead, study by drug class: learn the shared mechanism, side effects, and assessments for all beta-blockers together, then all ACE inhibitors together. Group your meds by class first, make one card per class, then individual cards only for exceptions.
In this video, I'm gonna tell you the one thing you absolutely need to stop doing when studying pharmacology in nursing school. Listen up, friend, because this one tip is going to save you about a gazillion hours studying in nursing school. That's extra time you have to spend with your family, your kiddos, and maybe even get a nap in. So seriously, don't miss this. I'm also going to give you my step by step process for studying pharmacology will really help make learning medications way easier for you. Now hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell and let's do this. Pharmacology is one of the hardest subjects you'll learn in nursing school. It's not just about a one and done class. You give beds every single day at clinical and as a nurse, so it's going to follow you wherever you go. So you've got to know your stuff. There's about a gazillion meds out there and it can be super, super overwhelming to figure out how to learn them all and learn them fast so you can get on with your life. So I'm going to give you the step by step process that I followed in nursing school to help me learn medications faster. If you're a nursing SOS member, make sure to log into your dashboard and check out the how to study Pharmacology course, which will walk you through even more tips and tricks for learning medications faster. Now, to make this process super smooth for you, I really recommend that you grab a drug guide. Most schools require them, so you probably have one already. If not, this one is my favorite. It's the Davis Drug Guide. So you can check this one out. Super easy to use and it has all the information that you need to know about each medication. It's the one that I use through nursing school and beyond. I totally love it. So, so step number one when studying pharmacology is to list out all of the medications you need to know and divide them up by drug class. So many nursing students don't know this, but all of the medications in one drug class act the same way in the body. They have the same or similar mechanism of action, which basically means they do the same thing. So for example, the class of medications, beta blockers, latch onto beta receptors and inhibit them. So they literally block beta receptors. Beta receptors are usually responsible for increasing the heart rate and keeping the lung airways open. So when these receptors are blocked, those are flipped, they're reversed, the heart rate goes down and the airways narrow. There are a ton of beta blocker medications like Metoprolol, Atenolol, Carvedilol, Labetalol, Bezoprolol, all those olals. So here's the number one mistake nursing students make when stick studying pharmacology. So they try to memorize all the info for each individual medication. Which is a total waste of time because all of the medications within one drug class act similar in the body. It's like studying 12 things when you can focus on studying only one. So this is the one thing you must stop doing when learning medications. Instead of memorizing everything there is to know about each individual medication, divide them up by drug class. Now if you noticed all of those beta blocker medications have the same ending to them. Olol, like Metoprolol, Atenolol, Carvedilol. So what you'll notice is that so many medications inside a particular drug class will have the same ending. To make it super easy for you, I've listed a bunch of them out on a free cheat sheet for you. So you can just download that. Keep it with you as you study so you'll be able to quickly recognize what medications go into which drug class. It's super handy. The link is in the description for you to snag that. Now we'll get to step number two, which is super important. But first I want to give a shout out to our YouTube comment of the week which says this is from Giselle. Was still confused about this until I watched your video. Thank you so much. Now I'm ready for my final. Thank you so much Giselle for your sweet comment. I am so, so happy that our videos have helped you out and good luck on your finals my friend, and keep your comments coming. Not only do they tell YouTube that our videos are super cool and more people should see them, but they also give me great feedback on what videos you want to see more of. And I really love getting to know you, of course. Now let's move on to step number two. In step number two, you will learn the mechanism of action of the drug class, not the mechanism of action of the individual drug. That's a total waste of time, friend, because it's going to be the exact same or crazy similar. Don't do that to yourself. Just focus on learning the mechanism of action of the drug class. After that, you will automatically know the mechanism of action for all of the drugs within that drug class since they all act the same way or similar in the body. Now step number three is to create med cards with all the Info that you need to know about the drug class. See, we're still talking about drug class here. Now write out the common side effects, what you need to assess for, anything you need to know about giving it or administering it, what you need to educate your patient on, all for the drug class. So go through the medications in your drug guide and find the commonalities between them, the side effects, the nursing assessment, how to give it, what patient education you need to do all those things. I'm going to tell you right now this will take a while, but it won't take nearly as long as it would if you would just try to memorize them all individually, which is why following these steps is so important. It's super helpful for you to see what each of the medications in each drug class have in common and learn that first. And then you can go on to step number four, which is to make med cards for the individual medications you need to know. And I know right about now you're feeling like this was a bait and switch because I just told you not to study individual medications. But here's the beautiful thing about this. Since you've already studied the drug class, you will already know most of the info that you need to know for each individual medication. It's fabulous. It seriously will save you so much time studying. So now here in step number four, what you're doing is filling in any glaring gaps in knowledge. So maybe one medication has a specific side effect that other medications, medications in its drug class don't have. Or maybe you want to write down what concentration and rate each medication should be given at through an IV push. Those will be differences between each medication that you can write down here on your med card if you choose. But for the most part, you will already know most of what you need to know. Bye now. Because you're a rockstar nursing student and studied the drug class first. Now in the next video, I'm going to walk you through how to make med cards step by step. I get this question all the time from nursing students about what to include in med cards and how to write them out. So in the next video I'm going to show you now, make sure to like, comment, subscribe and share this video with a friend. And click on one of these videos right over here so you can keep rocking nursing school and go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I will catch you in the next video. Friend. Take care. Bye bye.
