How Much Pharmacology is on the NGN NCLEX

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The new NGN NCLEX is going to test your vocabulary and reading comprehension, and the first step is to understand how much pharmacology is on there and what to do about it.

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I'm Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of The Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/P/mobile. Let's get started with the show.

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I just want to talk briefly about the Next Generation NCLEX. The new exam is out April 1st and uh we'll talk a little bit about how much pharmacology is on there but I think that the most valuable thing you can do is make sure you understand the question and you're going to have a lot more reading on this with the six three case studies uh six questions each and when you start looking at the case studies what you're going to find is there's going to be terms that you know really well, there's terms there that you don't know at all and there's terms that you think you know.

And I think the most valuable thing you can do is to have a running list of all the terms as you're going through your practice questions that you don't really remember or don't really understand and then go back to memorizing them. So I get it, the NCLEX is supposed to be about understanding the scenario and all these things but if you don't know what certain terms are then you're in trouble.

So what's going to come into play here and uh you know I hate to bring you back to English class but you know if you have something like the word diaphoresis that's sweating but diaphoretic is someone who has sweated in the adjectival form is an adjective and so on and you may not necessarily, you might know like the word in one way but maybe not know it in another. And I think that one of the real ways to get an advantage is to improve your reading comprehension of the words that are in there.

So maybe you take a practice exam and when you go back through the practice exam I think one of the keys is to make sure that you understand all the terms and anytime you come into a condition or something you really don't know, you're going to want to take the time to really slow down and make sure that you memorize or remember that word.

So this is the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast so we'll focus on that part of it but I just went to nclex.com and how to prepare and they've got a big sample pack of questions and an exam preview and there's almost 150 questions in there so a really good preparation in terms of number of questions to understand what's going on but you have to go to the candidate test plan to see what percentage is going to be pharmacology.

And so we go down through the test plan. I would have showed you questions but it's copyrighted and they made clear that they don't want that being shown in that way but if you look at pharmacological and parenteral therapies, you're looking at 13 to 19 percent okay. So if you see 13 to 19 percent and you have between 85 and 150 questions, quick back of the napkin math means that you could have as few as 11 questions if you were done with 85 again that 13 percent or if you finished at 85, you could have answered 16 uh questions but it can go all the way up to almost 29 pharmacology questions which represents almost 20 percent of the exam.

So when I'm looking at this and I'm saying all right well how would I want my students to prepare for something like this it really comes down to reading comprehension and making sure that I know every single word on there. And the big words, that problem with pharmacology questions is that if you don't know what the drug is for then you really can't answer the question. And that's unlike where okay I've got this case, I see all these things happening all these pieces put together, I think I can kind of make a reasonable assessment of what's going on but if you have a straight line, what's going to be an adverse effect you need to watch out for with blank, and you're like, I don't know what blank is. Well, it's extremely difficult to get that one right. So when I think about something like that, I'm always treating it like a language. Like I'm trying to learn this new language and you learn medical terminology and then you kind of took that into anatomy and physiology and then into pathophysiology and then through your nursing clinicals, then you are now applying all of that.

But with pharmacology, the words don't really conform to traditional English in their pronunciation. And when you need to figure like, oh gosh, what's this one for? They don't give you a list of well here are the drugs you need to know. There is no such list. So what we have to do is go and use okay what are the most commonly used medications. And so that's where memorizing pharmacology, that original book that everyone still loves, I think.

Most of James Gillies, I mean he's Scottish but it's a British narrator basically where that really he introduces you. So that's the first baby step, just listen to it and understand okay I get how to start picking up the language as I'm going to and from clinicals or to and from college. Because what you want to do is you want to kind of hear it and then all of a sudden your reticular activator is going to be open. So just as maybe you bought a blue car and all of a sudden you see blue cars everywhere.

Same thing, once you start hearing these terms all of a sudden you're gonna start hearing people say them and then they're gonna really stick. So it's not about trying to get okay I've got to get a thousand questions done and so forth. It's about taking the time to go back and say okay what words did I not understand or there's some medication names in there that I really needed to know whether it's some pathophysiologic terms that I didn't know was there some different form of a verb or some form of a word that was in its adjectival or adverbial form that made it more difficult for me.

Okay let's go back to the roots and this exam is very much a reading exam so if you struggle or haven't really been challenged to read out loud then now is the time to start. And where you see yourself starting to stumble that's really where you're gonna want to start working through these words.

Although it's a British narrator, I directed his pronunciation to be the American pronunciations even with something as simple as beta blocker which in the UK would be beta blocker. We use albuterol they use salbutamol and so everything in here is the United States versions but the key is to get that vocabulary down.

So once you start understanding the vocabulary that you're looking for, you're having these conversations with others or even getting ready to make sure that you succeed in your pharmacology class because I've said over and over again, you have to really take in Pharmacology to do really well in Pharmacology. That may seem counter-intuitive but it's what I found.

Then you're ready to start really working with the bigger mnemonics and those bigger mnemonics are the memorizing pharmacology mnemonics. And I've shared a bunch of them on the podcast but what you really now need to do is say okay now that I understand what the word is I need to know where it fits in.

And so now you're talking about okay how do I remember a dihydropyridine versus a non-dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker? Okay which one was the one that affects the heart and the vessels which one just affects the vessels? Okay I've got an alpha Agonist versus an alpha antagonist okay which one's going to open up the vessels which one's going to close up the vessels which one's going to cause fainting?

You know I've got a beta blocker, what's it going to do? So beta, the B always goes with bradycardia kind of pushes it down okay why would I use a beta Agonist? Okay well now I'm going to open up the lungs and all of these different pieces that come with it that goes into the memorizing pharmacology mnemonic.

So first it's just like grade school, you first learn the words and then you learn the words relation to each other. And I think the biggest challenge that's going to happen with this NCLEX ngn and again my undergraduate degree is in English although my doctoral Pharmacy.

I really know that when you create case studies that everybody has to take and there are three case studies, six questions each. The reading comprehension, how quickly you can read, how quickly you can understand what's going on and separate the pieces so that you don't get lost in the forest for the trees as it were. I think that's really what's going to be the thing that separates those that pass with just the 85 questions and those that are really struggling to the 150 or maybe even failing.

So you know, it's like well, when would I have time to read? Well, I'm not asking you to read for pleasure. I'm just saying that when you do your practice tests and you have your practice questions rather than just say okay these are the ones I got right and these were the ones I got wrong. I would go through all the questions and go through okay these were the words I didn't understand even in the ones that you got right because there's one in four chance a lot of times that you got it right but you didn't know.

That you maybe didn't know it because it's really going to be a reading comprehension exam and as fair or unfair as that is, that's what the decision has been to do this now. Yeah, it would have maybe made more sense in this kind of digitally technological world that we could have somebody actually creating these kind of scenarios where you're actually listening to it and here's what's happening this is what you see what do you do and I'm sure it will get there eventually.

But right now, the NGN is really the Next Generation NCLEX is really, I think a reading exam and the best way to improve your reading is to write down the word that you didn't know. Use the mnemonics that I've given you in the podcast and the books and all those things to find a way to remember them because there are some things that it just gets so. The word I want to use is it gets the terminology kind of overpowers it and you're just like oh my gosh what is going on here what are all.

How am I not familiar with these words and it's not that you weren't familiar with them, it's that you've never read them. You've only heard them or maybe you've glanced at them or seen them. So I think that as you kind of continue on, I think you're gonna have to become much more conversational and much more fluent in reading as you're kind of moving toward the NCLEX and so forth.

So one way to get that good feeling and to make sure that you know what the question is saying is to get better at reading and you get better at reading by doing the vocab words. So anyway, if you got questions for me, Tony the pharmacist at gmail.com again if you've never had an audiobook on Audible before memorizing pharmacology whether it's the first or second edition or memorizing pharmacology mnemonics if you're kind of getting toward okay well how do I put all of this together.

I think that either of those can be really helpful on making sure you understand the question so that you can answer it well. Thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes, cheat sheets, and more at memorizingfarm.com again. You can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening. Thank you.

Like to learn more?

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