hydrocodone acetominophen has a trade name of Norco this is a medication very commonly given to posttop patients and to patients who are in the hospital and are experiencing pain therapeutic class is opioid analgesic allergy cold and City and anti-tussive pharmacologic class is opioid Agonist and non-opioid analgesic combination what is really helpful with these types of medications is we can combine the hydrocodone with acetaminophen so we can thereby decrease the amount of the hydrocodone that we're giving and using the acetominophen is kind of an adjunct to help with the pain while giving a lower dose of the uh hydrocodone so the reason we give it is management of moderate to severe pain and what it does it Alters our perception and reaction to Pain by binding to opiate receptors in the CNS and can also suppress the cough reflex but really the reason we're going to give this is a lot of times for patients like posttop pain or general pain in the hospital and this will help to kind of decrease that pain perception for patients a couple big things to keep in mind here is that these medications can cause hypotension so we want to Monitor hemodynamics and respirations after administering so we really want to be close to our patient after we give this medication and we want to know what their blood pressure is and the respirations are before we even give it what's their heart rate blood pressure respirations and then we want to come back and make sure that we're watching that closely so that we don't depress the CNS too much to the point that they go into respiratory failure or they go into severe hypotension another thing to keep in mind here we talked about this with acetaminophen before is that we don't want to exceed 4 gram of acetominophen in a day this can cause GI bleeding and it can be very bad for the liver for for the GI so we really want to stay below 4 G of acetaminophen daily usually uh your medication your computer as you scan a patient and give them certain types of medications it's going to kind of tally up how much acetominophen we've given them and we'll make sure that we don't go over that 4 G limit now for our opioids you remember that our our antidote for opioids is Naran so if a patient does go into respiratory failure or they they stop being as arousable we would give them Naran to try to reverse the CNS depression and to wake them up and get them alert again so again a medication you're going to see very often in your in your time in a hospital biggest things I want you to keep in mind here are the importance of monitoring CNS and the importance of monitoring that they don't get more than the four gram of the aaminin in a day this has been another episode of the medmaster podcast by nrsng.com to get our free cheat sheet covering the 50 most commonly prescribed medications head over to nrsng.com sl50 meds that's NRS g.com meds thank you so much for joining me today and thank you for being part of the nrsng family we're here to help you succeed in nursing school and in life so start your journey today over at nrsng.com 50ms we're glad to have you aboard you know what time it is now it's time to go out and be your best self today happy nursing [Music] y'all