Hello viewer, my name is Mélodie
Nursing students, like myself, all want to become skilled and safe nurses. I believe that most of us see patient safety as our top priority. We study, practice, and learn every day so that we can take good care of the people who depend on us. However, sometimes the most important problems are not the ones we notice right away.
I'll admit, sometime in nursing school, there is a huge amount of information to learn, and it can sometime feel impossible to remember everything perfectly. But as a student, right now is the perfect time to find the right tools to help me work safely around the hospital.
Through my nursing studies, I have developed a strong understanding of how the human body works, and I am able to learn new things quickly.
My goal today is to help nurses practice in the safest way possible when it comes to medication administration, and help reduce the risk of medication errors.
So, for all the nurses watching this, stay right there, and watch this video till the end.
It might help you become a better and safer nurse.
Today, I want to talk about an important topic that can cause a lot of issue in healthcare, and that is drugs interaction. Nurses have to manage multiple medications for patients every day, and we need to do it safely. But it impossible to remember every possible interaction between medications. But like I said, as a future nurse, I am trying to find some tools that will help me be more effective and safer.
In a hospital setting, like I said, we often have patients who take several medications at the same time. Some patient may also already be taking medication, and if a new one is prescribed they could have some interactions with each other. Even if the doctor is supposed to carefully check this type of stuff, in a busy environment like the hospital, an error in this type of situation can happen.
For example, if a patient in the hospital who is already receiving heparin, an anticoagulant to prevent blood clots, and this patient later tell me he took an aspirin by himself for his pain. In this situation I need to quickly know the risk of this two medication together, because this patient is now at a higher risk of bleeding.
One helpful solution to avoid this kind of mistake is to use an online drug interaction checker.
To access it, you type Drug Interaction Checker in your internet browser, and go to the Medscape website.
When you open the website, you see directly the Drug Interaction Checker in the center of the screen. If you click on the Medscape logo in the top left corner, it will take you to the homepage, where you can find many scientific and medical articles. At the top of the page, in the middle, we have the navigation menu with a section for references and tools, and a little to the right you can see the educational content section. Just below this, there is the search bar, where you can directly look up information instead of searching of it on the website. In the top right corner of the page, you can log in, or sing up to this site, and also change the language. Today, we will work in the Tools and References tab. In this tab, you can find a lot of information about different medication, conditions, and procedures. There are also quizzes and simulations, however you need to have an account to access this information.
In the tool section, there is the Drug Interaction Checker, which is what I will focus on today. You just need to type the names of the medications you want to check, and press enter, scroll down a little, and the result is there.
So, if you are in nursing school or a related field, Medscape Drug Interaction Checker is one way to reduce the risk of medication interactions errors, and make your practice safer.
I hope this will be useful in your future carer, and in return for this gift of knowledge, it would be only fair if you clicked the red subscribe button below the video. Tanks a lot for watching.
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