Perfecting your practice

This article will tell you about

• How a group of second year students and recently qualified nurses performed when doing drug calculations
• Which type of calculation nurses found more difficult
• What can be done to improve nurses’ skill in drug calculations

You would be likely to reference this article if you were researching:

• Prescribing
• Drug calculations
• Medicines management

In what situations will this article be useful to me?

This research study tested 229 second year student nurses and 44 registered nurses on key calculation skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages and conversions. And it tested them on the main types of drug calculations such as dosage calculations for solid and liquid oral medication and injections, and intravenous fluids. This study showed that both students and nurses were able to perform calculations for solids, oral liquids and injections more easily than calculations for drug percentages, drip and infusion rates. This article highlights the need for regular practice in drug calculation to maintain skills.

Questions for your mentor/tutor

• What are the range of skills that I need for drug calculations?
• How can I best practise my drug calculations skills?
• How can I get more practice?

Student Nursing Times Decoder

• Numerical testing: This assesses your skills on the use of numbers including adding, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals and  percentages.
• Drug calculation testing: This assesses your skills on how you calculate correct doses of medications in a range of formats including  solid and liquid oral medication and intravenous therapy.

Other articles you might find useful

• Poor numeracy skills must be tackled to cut medication errors
• How to avoid drug errors
• Alarm over hospital medication errors

This article tells you about:

• The importance of patient feedback
• What ‘patient experience’ is
• How children can have a say in their care

You would be likely to reference this article if you were researching:

• Patient experience
• Patient feedback
• Children’s nursing

In what situations will this article be useful to me?

It will increase and cement your knowledge of the importance of patients being able to feedback their experiences of healthcare services. Listening to patients and actively seeking their feedback is gradually becoming ingrained in healthcare delivery. It is fundamental to a service being able to meet the needs of its users. It is difficult to get the views of patients who are in minority or vulnerable groups. This articles looks at how to ensure the views of children are heard in the planning and delivery of services.

Questions for your mentor/tutor

• Why is patient feedback important?
• Why did we not listen to patients in the past?

Student Nursing Times Decoder

• Patient experience: This is how patients have experienced healthcare. It includes how they feel about their treatment and about  their interaction with health professionals including nurses. Patient experience can be both positive and negative and we can learn from both in shaping and delivering care.

This article tells you about:

• What ‘failure to rescue’ is
• What are the potential points of failure
• How failure to rescue rates are compared between hospitals

You would be likely to reference this article if you were researching:

• failure to rescue
• deteriorating patient
• patient observations

In what situations will this article be useful to me?

Nurses have a responsibility to identify when a patient’s condition is deteriorating through taking, recording and interpretation of patient observations. If a patient dies when their condition was treatable this is referred to as ‘failure to rescue’ (FTR). This article explains how the rates of FTR can be used as indicators of the quality of care and compared between hospitals.

Questions for your mentor/tutor

• What are other indicators of quality of care?
• What are the difficulties in comparing indicators of care quality?

Decoder

• Failure to rescue
• Failure to rescue is when a patient who has had a surgical procedure dies from a cause that was preventable.

Early warning scores

Early warning scores use physiological measurements such as pulse and blood pressure recording to help identify patients who are, or who may become, critically ill. A combination of patient observations gives a score which can provide an early indication of deterioration.

Other articles you might find useful

• Simulation: can it eliminate failure to rescue?
• Are early warning scores the only way to rapidly detect and manage deterioration?
• Implementing the Patient Safety First intervention to reduce harm from deterioration