When talking about nursing school, time management is a must. Whether it's for your clinicals, documentation, or even note taking. Using abbreviations will help make your work easier. Unlike the common ones, nursing has its own set of abbreviations. Every nursing student should understand them and make it a point to use them regularly.
The following is a list of common abbreviations that you need to master, I have tried to categorize them into specific groups—while not standard, they’re helpful.
Patient Assessment
When studying about patient assessment, it is important that you learn some of the key abbreviations that you will not only use for note taking in class, but also during actual practice. With this in mind, make it an initiative to learn and practice using most of the following abbreviations, because they will save you time and will make your communication with the physician and other healthcare teams easy.
SOB – shortness of breath
TPR – temperature, pulse, respiration
Abd – abdomen
FF – Forced feeding/fluids
C/O – Complaint of
LOC – level of consciousness
PERRL – pupils equal, round and reactive to light
Sx – surgical history
Stat – immediately
S/S – signs and symptoms
NKA – no known allergies
S – without
NC – nausea and vomiting
Diagnosis or Dx
Another important set of abbreviations that you will have to practice using are those related to patient diagnosis. Besides shortening your study time and making it easy for you to recall what was taught during class lectures, they could also improve your communication with the physician in actual practice and reduce your rate of making errors.
UTI – urinary tract infection
QOL – quality of life
OU – both eyes (oculo utro)
OS – Left eye
OD – right eye
NS – normal saline
MI – myocardial infarction
HTN – hypertension
DM – Diabetes Mellitus
COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder
Time
Time is an important factor in nursing, and often you will have to include it in your patient assessments, diagnosis, and recommendations. It is therefore, important if you start learning the best way to abbreviate time related terms.
q – every
h – hour
These two abbreviations can be combined with any number to show a repeat session. For example, q2h means every 2 hours, or q4h means every 4 hours. The time has been standardized to 0900h, 1300h, and 1700 to follow in loop.
d - day, therefore qd - everyday or when o is added then it becomes qod – every other day. There is also another important abbreviation that is often used in prescriptions, which is tid – three times a day and this is also standardized to 0900h, 1300h and 1700h.
Dictionaries are currently being produced to help nursing students learn all the key abbreviations that are related to nursing. Apart from the few that are given above, many other abbreviations are still in use. They can be helpful during your study hours and useful for getting the most out of a lecture session.
The idea is to be careful, however, because some abbreviations might be as easy as combining the initials of the terms being abbreviated. One example is DM for diabetes mellitus. Others could be borrowed from a different language, hence creating confusion for those unfamiliar with the terms and their abbreviations. For this, an example is OU for “both eyes,” derived from Latin words oculo utro.
At the end of the day, a good understanding of these abbreviations will help you improve your grades and still be useful in the end when you start practicing.
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