5 of the Best Mobile Apps for Nurses

The life of a nurse is hectic. You are usually responsible for managing several patients at once, providing all kinds of care from measuring temperature and blood pressure to giving injections to monitoring vital signs such as pulse. Of course, all of that needs to be done with a smile because you are also responsible for calming patients down. Your job is critical because you, not the doctor, are typically the first one to greet or respond to each patient.

You may not have much time to think when you have a health crisis on your hands, and mobile apps can be literal lifesavers for your patients and virtual lifesavers for you. Nurses and nursing students in the clinic can use them to get instant information so you can continue with your duties. Nursing students can also use them as educational aids.

Here are 5 of the Best Mobile Apps for Nurses:

1. Health Calculator: When you’ve got a serious medical emergency on your hands, the last thing you need is to fish around for simple formulas and spend precious time on calculations. Instead, you can let the Health Calculator for Androids quickly calculate the basic information for you. It calculate things like body mass index, water requirements, basal metabolic rate, body fat, pregnancy calculator and blood alcohol level.
2. Evernote: Evernote is an app for the Android that you can use during your education in nursing. You can take notes in text or upload images of notes. Then you can organize your notes into virtual notebooks and use virtual markers, called tabs, as flags to remind yourself of important points. Evernote can be just as useful while you are doing your rounds as a nursing student or professional nurse. Carry it with you and take notes as you interact with each patient so that you don’t have to interrupt your day to continually return to a desk-based computer after each patient visit.
3. CCRN Exam Prep (Critical Care): The CCRN Exam Prep is an app for nursing students. It is a study tool for the certification exam to become a critical care nurse under the AARN, or American Association of Registered Nurses. A similar app is Certified Emergency Nurse, which has flashcards and practice quizzes for the CEN exam. This app is for the Android Operating System and requires version 1.0 and up.
4. Carter’s Encyclopedia of Health and Medicine: This is the next best thing to a photographic memory. Instead of carrying around a heavy book, you can access the information from your iPad or iPhone wherever you are. The encyclopedia has 12,000 entries on important facts, including treatments and medical abbreviations. The contents should be understood by anyone with a high school education, and certainly no prior knowledge of medicine or science is necessary.
5. Pocket Lab Values: The Pocket Lab Values app has the standard lab value ranges so you can quickly check whether your patients’ values require follow-up. The app connects to online sources, such as Google search and Medline Plus from the National Institutes of Health. This app is available for both Android operating systems and iPhones/iPads.

Nurses and nursing students have a lot of duties and pressure. Your priority is to serve your patients, and mobile apps can help by providing information no matter where you are. Some apps are designed to help students study for their nursing exams.