hey everyone it's sealed with registered nurse orient comm and in this video I'm going to go over how to study for medical surgical nursing in nursing school so I'm going to cover why students struggle in this class calling mistakes they make how to study I'm going to simplify it for you and show you what to concentrate and then I'm going to take it a step further and actually cover a topic that you may be tested on at some time show you how to break it down what areas you need to focus on how to take the study guide and your notes and compare and between the two and grab that material that you need to know for a test and then give you a sample test question using that material and show you what your professor is going to be looking for okay so why do students struggle in this class this class is the first nursing class that students encounter that's going to require you to put it all together you're going to have to know your pathophysiology your pharmacology your fundamentals of Nursing and it's all coming together and this is also where students are getting the first taste of in click style test questions on your exams and medical surgical nursing is not fact-based questions like remember an A&P it's like which bone is connected to the femur that's a fact that doesn't require a critical thinking that requires memorization and this is where students tend to struggle because they don't know how to answer these type of questions because they're so used to fact-based questions and next last but not least they have issues with just memorizing material and not fully understanding it so common mistakes I'm going to go in depth with this ok first some students they try to read every chapter word by word and this is not a good idea because this wastes a lot of time and in reality your brain is getting fried because there's so much material to read because medical surgical books they are like thick they're like thousands of pages and chapters are hundreds of pages so instead of trying to read it word by word develop a great strategy which I want to give you things that you need to pick out on certain topics and apply that to that next they don't know how to answer NCLEX questions which is what I just said I made a whole video that I really recommend that you check out my link will be in the description below and I'll give you five strategies on how to answer in CLECs questions because these questions are critical thinking questions they will give you a scenario and they will give you responses and all the responses could be right but there's one response that is the best and with those strategies I talked about I show you how to eliminate and pick the right ones next they don't truly understand the material rather they just tried to memorize it for instance in medical surgical nursing you're going to have to know about congestive heart failure sometimes students make the mistake of just trying to memorize how what congestive heart failure is what those symptoms are but you have to truly understand you have to understand what's going on in the body whenever a patient is experiencing congestive heart failure then everything else will make sense the medications that will be that the patient will be on will make sense because they'll be on a diuretic because what's happening with congestive heart failure is that your heart muscle is weak so you have backup of fluid and you'll understand why that patients getting those symptoms and then you'll take the step further and it'll be like common sense of why you're going to be providing these common nursing interventions and what's going to be a priority with them so you have to truly grasp this material and last they don't give themselves enough time to study now in our study series we have went over several and videos of how to organize your time how to plan how to set up your planner when preparing for an exam and I really recommend that you check those videos out to help you develop a really good study plan now how do you study for this class okay first I've always honed in on this on all my study videos you have to learn what type of learner you are are you a visual learner auditory learner tactile learner or read/write learner because that will help you focus what you need to focus on whenever you're studying because visual learners learn little bit differently than auditory learners okay with most tests in your medical surgical class I know my professors did actually for all my nursing classes they gave us like a basic study guide and the study guide was maybe like two pages and it just had key concepts on it of what was going to be covered on the test for instance it would say congestive heart failure pneumothorax --is renal failure diabetic ketoacidosis things like that and you would have to go and know everything about those topics because those were going to be test questions which is really helpful when studying so hopefully your professor will give you a study guide most do next you're going to get a study guide I really really recommend a study guide especially when you start hitting these nursing classes these are the three I recommend don't get all three pick one and go with it the first one I recommend is Saunders comprehensive Inc Lex review guide if you get this book you won't need any other review books for your classes because it's just a huge book that contains everything that you need to know for nursing for NCLEX and it's so great and guiding you how to study for these lecture exams or if you want to get individual books because these are really good as well they focus I recommend medical surgical made incredibly easy this is a great book it breaks down the content for you has practice questions specifically related to medical surgical nursing the Saunders review book does - it comes with a CD and you can click in the software if you just want to practice medical surgical questions and then another one that I really recommend I love this company is Pearson review and rationales for medical surgical nursing another great book you can't go wrong with either of those two so what you do whenever you're fixing to study you get your study guide you get your book your textbook you'll be using that to read in but you're not going to be reading it word by word forward you're just going to be looking at the concepts and the key notes in it then you're going to look at the notes that you took in class you're going to get your powerpoints out that your teacher has given you your study guide book and what you're going to do with all of those things is that you're going to take the key concept and you're going to say that you're going to ever congestive heart failure you're going to read in your book about congestive heart failure you're going to hit the highlights next you're going to look at your notes what does the professor go over in class go and look at the powerpoints then you're going to go to your study guide and you're going to read the section about congestive heart failure and what's great about these study guides is it highlight bold puts asterisks everything by things that are really hit on on exam exams and on the ink Lex and you're going to understand those your book is what's going to help you understand the patho behind it and the study guide is just going to highlight the important concepts in it now say that you're still having a problem understanding the path OB cuz you really a medical/surgical any disease process you're going over you have to understand how it's affecting the body to grasp nursing interventions to grasp some medicines and everything like that if you're still not getting after all that I really recommend on YouTube YouTube is a great resource right and you get on there and you try to find videos that people have made about these certain disease processes because it'll help you learn it and understand it take it even a step further that helped me and it's helped a lot of other students so if you ever have trouble do that then after you do all that practice Inc Lex questions prior to an exam in those content areas because remember what I said was that medical surgical reason students struggle is because of the in click style questions and practicing these questions over and over is going to help you get in a rhythm help you develop your strategies and understanding what these questions are asking you so prior to an exam always practice in cliques questions in those content areas that you're going over for that particular subject now let's talk about a certain thing I want to give you an example so you can help understand what I'm talking about in applying these strategies okay say your fix I have a medical surgical exam and on the study guide your teacher says know about pneumothorax because pneumothorax is going to be on there so what you want to do is you want to get out all your resources you want to get all your textbooks your notes your study guides and your powerpoints and you want to pay attention to these content areas about pneumothorax the patho behind it causes a pneumothorax assessment bindings nursing interventions and test order because whenever you're going to be given a case scenario or a test question it's going to have all this information in it or you're going to have to give this information in the test and for one of the options so let me show you an example of a pneumothorax of class notes that have been taken taken of pneumothorax and compare it to a study guide it's actually a saunders comprehensive in clicked study guide I think it's audition for and show you how you look and you find the similarities and you make note of that because those are probably going to be test questions okay first let's look at the study guide now in this study guides us under study guides Edition for I have looked up pneumothorax and I'm going to show you how to compare what's in the book with your notes and how to point out the most important parts now in study guides they're just so great for breaking everything down and it's easily put everything in an order for us and first it's down the bottom that's where we're starting and it talks about the description of a pneumothorax and tells you what it is gives you a little bit of the pathophysiology behind it and what happens and then see the points see it's talking about a spontaneous pneumothorax which is a rupture of a pulmonary blood and then it talks about an open pneumothorax and E which is point E it says a tension pneumothorax which occurs from blunt chest injury to the chest or a mechanical ventilation can cause that so that I just talked about like the different types of pneumothorax is that you can have in a lot of tests will throw out there to you and will tell you hey this patient's x-ray show chest x-ray showed a rupture of a pulmonary blood what do you expect to find with this patient so you know is spontaneous and you have to answer accordingly so always make sure anytime you're looking at some disease process and it says there's this this and this different types you're always looking at that and then to it points you up to the Box up at the top it's showing you how a patient is going to present with a pneumothorax and you have all types of things like they're going to have absent breath sounds on an affected side they're going have fast heart rate difficulty breathing and tracheal deviation to the unaffected side with the tension pneumothorax and you really any type you anytime you see boxes or anything in your study guide look at those those are so important and then you'll go down to three and it says intervention and notice those little triangles on the right this is really important because it's telling you hey this is important this may be an option on a test and you need to know this for a pneumothorax so if you had a pneumo you would want to put a dressing over the chest wound if it was open administer oxygen place them in high Fowler's position prepare for a chest tube placement watch for subcutaneous emphysema things like that you want to commit that to memory now let's go over and look at some notes that you could take in class about a pneumo and for this specific class the teacher went over pneumothorax talked about what it was and then highlighted in pink the teacher talked about you know the different types spontaneous open tension and things like that and they talked about the mediastinal shift which what can happen with the tension and pneumothorax is are diagnosed with chest x-rays and teacher went over how the patient may present and then at the bottom of the nursing interventions and what I've done is that I've highlighted in pink whenever I refer back to my study guide avoid the common similarities of what I've seen between my notes of what my teacher said and what I found in the book and this really helps because this right here is literally telling you hey memorize this stuff know this stuff commit it to memory because this is probably going to be on an exam so that's just super helpful when you're trying to take a certain topic that a teacher has told you is going to be on a test and you're trying to find out what you're going to need to know for the exam okay now that you see the comparison and if you notice I pointed out spontaneous pneumothorax and tension pneumothorax and in this sample question I want to give you it has to deal with those so let's go over this question a patient is admitted to the ER with blunt force trauma to the chest so you should automatically be thinking this is a pneumothorax and it's probably going to be a tension one because they've had blunt trauma to the chest on assessment you know the patient has no breath sounds on the left side just be a oxygen saturation of 80% a heart rate of 120 this should be sending off a red flag to you whenever you studied your assessment findings because remember in that study guide it was talking about that and they're probably not gonna have breath they're gonna have absent breath sounds on one side meaning that the lungs clap which in turn will have difficulty breathing their oxygen saturation is going to be down and their heart stone I try to be compensating for it to shift more oxygen everywhere and so it's going to be pumping faster so it's like hey I know for sure this patient has a pneumothorax not 100% sure but I'm pretty sure and it's probably a tension pneumothorax because the tech is the question that said blunt-force trauma okay which of the following findings may also be present with this patient now anytime you're answering in CLECs questions you need to look at each option you need ask yourself hey is this statement true does this statement apply to what's going on to the patient because it can it'll throw out options that are true statements but it may not be true for what's going on with your patient so let's get started okay a a chest x-ray showing a ruptured pulmonary bleb this is a true statement but this is not for a tension pneumothorax this is for a spontaneous pneumothorax so this question this statement is false so we can automatically eliminate that be deviated trachea on the right side we know whenever we do have a tension pneumothorax we can have the mediastinal shift which was pointed out in the notes and you can have the trachea move to the unaffected side which we have no breath sounds on the left side so we would expect a deviated trachea to the right side so that may be correct so we're going to keep that in her mind okay see Paradoxal respiration respirations and this is a an assessment finding for a slow test and this was not one of our assessment findings for animo so we know that that's not it and then D Hamas Isis this is coughing up blood and this is an assessment finding for another condition does not happen with pneumothorax so we know that that's wrong and see how they've thrown these out here that yeah this could possibly be it but you had to know from looking at your assessment findings and all that stuff and knowing the pathophysiology of what's happening with a pneumo of what you would find so the answer is B deviated trachea on the right side okay so that is how you study for medical surgical nursing just remember to focus on those areas get a study guide and practice those in collects questions learn what those questions are asking you and you'll do great and thank you so much for watching this video and please check out my other videos on how to study for other classes in nursing school and please subscribe to this youtube channel