Nursing Podcast by NURSING.com (NRSNG) (NCLEX® Prep for Nurses and Nursing Students)

Test your pharm knowledge at: SIMCLEX.com If pharmacology is the thing that's breaking you right now, I want to start with the most freeing sentence you'll hear all week: you cannot memorize pharmacology, and you need to stop trying. I mean it. There are thousands of medications. Nobody — not your sharpest classmate, not your instructor, not a working nurse with twenty years on the floor — has them all memorized as individual facts. So if your study plan is "make flashcards for every drug and its dose and its side effects and its contraindications," I need you to hear that the plan itself is broken. It's not that you're failing pharm. It's that you're playing a game that can't be won the way you're playing it. Here's the shift that changes everything. You don't learn drugs. You learn classes. The whole secret of pharmacology is that medications travel in families, and the family tells you most of what you need to know. If you understand what a beta blocker does, you understand the whole "-olol" family — how it works, what it does to heart rate and blood pressure, what to watch for, who shouldn't get it. You just turned forty flashcards into one concept. Do that across the major classes and the ocean suddenly has a shape. So here's how I'd actually study it. First, learn the mechanism — what does this class do in the body? If you understand the mechanism, the side effects aren't a separate list to memorize; they're just the logical consequences of the mechanism. A drug that lowers blood pressure — of course it can cause dizziness when you stand up. You didn't memorize that. You understood it. Second, learn the class by its stem. The naming isn't random. "-pril" is an ACE inhibitor. "-statin" lowers cholesterol. "-azepam" is in the benzo family. Those word parts are free points the test is practically handing you, if you've trained your eye to see them. Third — and this is the part most students skip — you test yourself with questions, not flashcards. Because here's the thing the NCLEX actually cares about: it does not ask you to recite a drug's half-life. It asks you what you'd do. What you'd assess, what you'd teach the patient, what you'd hold and call the provider about. That's applied knowledge, and the only way to build applied knowledge is to practice applying it — in questions, with rationales, over and over.

Take a SIMCLEX at: SIMCLEX.com I want to talk to the student who has started to believe something quietly devastating: that the reason nursing school is so hard for you is that something is wrong with you. Maybe you have ADHD. Maybe you're dyslexic. Maybe you process things more slowly, or anxiety hijacks you the second a test starts. And somewhere along the way you started to wonder if you're just not built for this. I want to flip that whole thing on its head. Nursing school wasn't built for the way you learn. That is not the same as you being incapable of learning nursing. Those are two completely different statements, and the difference between them might be the difference between you quitting and you becoming a nurse. Here's what I mean. The traditional nursing school model is built for one specific kind of brain — the one that can sit through a three-hour lecture, read fifty dense pages, hold it all in working memory, and reproduce it on a timed test. If that's not your brain, the system doesn't bend. It just makes you feel like you're failing. But notice what's actually happening there: the system is testing how well you fit its method, not how good a nurse you'll be. And those are not the same thing. Some of the most extraordinary nurses I've known are people who struggled badly in that lecture-hall model. So let's talk about what actually works when school wasn't built for you. If you have ADHD and a three-hour study block is a fantasy, stop pretending it isn't. Work in short, intense bursts with real breaks. Use questions to create the stimulation and feedback your brain craves, instead of fighting to stay awake over highlighted notes. If you're dyslexic and reading is slow and exhausting, stop making reading your primary input — lean on questions, audio, diagrams, and patterns. If you process more slowly, give yourself permission to go deep on fewer things instead of skimming everything badly. And if anxiety is the enemy, the antidote isn't "calm down" — it's evidence. Anxiety thrives on uncertainty, and the cure for uncertainty is data about where you actually stand. Notice the thread running through all of those. The fix is never "try to be a different kind of brain." The fix is "study in a way that gives your brain feedback and patterns instead of brute-force memorization." Feedback is the great equalizer. It doesn't care how you learn. It just tells you what you know and what you don't — and that works for every kind of mind.

Start a SIMCLEX now at: SIMCLEX.com The NCLEX is not the place where you want to discover that your prep wasn't working. Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole episode. There's a question hiding underneath all your studying that most students never ask directly. It's not "Did I study?" Of course you studied. The real question — the one that matters — is "Am I ready?" And those two things are not the same. First hard truth. More studying does not always mean more readiness. Activity and progress feel identical from the inside, but they're different animals. You can log a hundred hours and still walk in with blind spots you've never tested, because human nature is to keep practicing what you already know and quietly avoid what you don't. It feels like work. It even feels good. But it leaves the dangerous gaps untouched. That leads to the thing I worry about most: false confidence. You start recognizing the familiar question patterns. The comfortable topics feel comfortable. And comfort disguises itself as readiness. But the NCLEX isn't a familiar quiz you can settle into. It's adaptive. It pushes on you, raises the difficulty as you go, and probes right at the edge of what you know. Recognizing a question on a calm afternoon is not the same as being ready for that pressure.

The Nursing Brain Sheet That Actually Works (PLUS FREE DOWNLOAD) GET YOUR FREE DOWNLOAD AT: https://nursing.com/cheat-sheet It's 10am on your first clinical day. You've got four pages of notes you can't make sense of, vital signs written on your hand, and you just forgot to chart that your patient went to the bathroom. Meanwhile, that beautiful color-coded brain sheet your instructor gave you? Completely useless. The problem isn't you. It's that academic brain sheets are designed for perfect theoretical patients who don't exist. You need a brain sheet for chaos. For the real world. For keeping your patients alive and yourself sane. You'll Learn: The 3 reasons most brain sheets fail (and why instructors keep giving them to you anyway) The only 6 sections your brain sheet actually needs Why time-based organization is the difference between success and medication errors The "pro move" for end-of-shift documentation that protects you legally The 3 biggest mistakes students make with brain sheets (and how to avoid them) Why your instructor will hate your brain sheet—and why that's totally fine The truth: Your brain sheet isn't about making your instructor happy. It's about keeping your patients safe when you're managing four people who all need pain meds at the same time. Resources mentioned: Head to NURSING.com for downloadable brain sheet templates, videos showing exactly how to fill them out, and examples from real clinical shifts. We built an entire section on clinical organization skills because nobody teaches you this in nursing school—they just expect you to figure it out. Keywords: nursing brain sheet, clinical organization, nursing student tips, clinical nursing, shift report, patient care organization, nursing documentation, med-surg clinical, student nurse, nursing school tips, clinical survival Connect with NURSING.com: 🌐 NURSING.com 📥 Download free brain sheet templates 📹 Watch step-by-step fill-out tutorials #NursingStudent #BrainSheet #ClinicalNursing #NursingSchool #StudentNurse #NursingTips #MedSurgNursing #NurseOrganization #ClinicalRotation #NursingDocumentation #FutureRN

View the full lesson here: https://academy.nursing.com/lesson/nursing-care-plan-ncp-for-pressure-ulcer-decubitus-ulcer-pressure-injury/?quiz-view=open All right. Let's work through an example Nursing Care Plan for a patient with a pressure ulcer or pressure ulcers, right? Let's look at the hypothetical patient. Let's think just about what we might see on this specific patient regarding the pressure ulcers. So subjective data, if I have a patient with a big wound, whether it's on their sacrum or their shoulder or their leg, they're probably going to be pretty uncomfortable, right? They might actually have some pain, right? Or they could potentially have some tenderness over the area, especially over those bony prominences. So that's something to think about for sure. Then you might actually see it, right? We're actually gonna see the pressure ulcer. So depending on the stage, stage one to stage four, make sure you check out the lesson on pressure ulcers inside of the med surg integumentary course to know how to stage these pressure ulcers.

I was so wrong . . . let me explain. I first created this shirt back in 2019 - at the time I was focused on the word "BEST". As in, "Be Your BEST Self". However, going through 2021 and all the way through 2023 my depression began to grow - immensely. At a few points it absolutely has been debilitating. This is nothing new - I've battled depression, bipolar, and anxiety for many years - but this time - the cloud was much darker. Nursing can be tough. Find hope at NURSING.com ❤️ Happy Nursing! Jon Haws, RN

Working as a nurse in the ICU, I cared for many patients who are burned into my mind and heart forever. One of those patients was a young mom, in her early 40s with children in their early teens, who had suffered from cancer that had metastasized to her brain. She was incredibly sick, and this cancer was extremely advanced. One night as I cared for her, she was feeling exceptionally sick. Just a couple hours into the shift, I was preparing her for bed. Her family stepped out and went home for the night. I could see that this night she was very upset - more so than other nights. She was low on energy, she was sad, she looked weaker than normal. Within moments of her family leaving for the night, she passed away quietly. Nursing is hard, find hope at NURSING.com ❤️ Happy Nursing! Jon Haws, RN

I've been where you are. During my first semester of nursing school, I walked into a room of 25 students who would be my cohort. As I scanned the faces, a chill ran down my spine. "I'm the only lucky one here," I thought. "Everyone else is so much more prepared. I hope no one discovers how dumb I am." This feeling didn't go away after graduation. On my first day as a new grad nurse in the Neuro ICU of a large Trauma I hospital in Dallas, I was sweating, out of breath, and utterly convinced I'd slipped through the cracks in the hiring process. I was certain all the other new nurses had gone to better schools, done better internships, and would survive orientation when I wouldn't. Visit NURSING.com to find the hope you need right now. ❤️ Happy Nursing! Jon Haws, RN