Making use of an apple watch has become almost essential in my everyday practice. As nurses, making use of apps is an essential component of your day.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword and this was of course true in medical practice with many doctors & nurses, using the pen daily, just to prescribe medications that could be life-saving for some of our patients. Now put the pen aside, an apple watch app has come particularly handy in consultation, allowing you to enhance the delivery of my patient’s care. I will be talking about the best apple watch apps for nurses to allow them to work more efficiently.
Best Apple Watch Apps for Nurses
MD+ CALC
I have to admit you will be using this app daily, MD CALC can be used both in consultation with my patients, out on home visits, and sometimes even on telephone triage.
What is MD-calc?
it’s a catalog of all of the calculations that are used to determine a patient’s risk daily and examples of these things are the Wells criteria for DVT or wells criteria for PE but it also includes a lot of other calculations for lots of different specialties.
A good thing about this app is that it’s very user friendly and all you need to do is swipe down across the different risk factors and then at the end, it gives you the patient score and what that means in terms of clinical risk to your patient so you can communicate that across in consultation.
This app is handy because there are endless amounts of calculations that need to be remembered and rather than committing those to memory or standing scratching your head in doubt as to what was that last component of the DVT risk, you can look at your watch and can do the calculation quickly, efficiently and determine your patient’s risk and give them the correct treatment now.
BNF
It’s a very handy app for nurses and should have on their apple watch.
What is BNF?
The BNF is the British national formulary and is the book on the medications that can be prescribed.
The reason why this app is good is that it’s very much like the previous app above. it’s a catalog with all the medications that can be prescribed.
Using the search on the app, you can search for the medication. Looking at the medication, it tells you the indication, doses for the different age groups, caution side effects of medications, and monitoring that you’d need to do of that medication for that patient.
Having this application on the apple watch saves you the time of rather using a thick book to search for medication.
MicroGuide
MicroGuide is an application that gives you the regional antibiotic or antimicrobial guidelines for various types of infections.
It’s really handy because it gives you the first-line treatment, second-line treatment, and then if your patients have any particular allergies what alternative antibiotics you can prescribe.
A special feature of this app is that it’s separated up into adult microbial and pediatric microbial and when you go into each one of those it then separates the antibiotic prescribing based on the body system. Another handy aspect of this app is that they’ve got useful resources such as contact numbers for your regional microbiologist and also have treatment for some of the common emergencies such as neutropenic sepsis or general sepsis.
MicroGuide acts as a good revision tool to make sure that you’re not missing anything when you’re treating your patients.
Nice CKS Guidelines
Nice CKS guidelines give you a step-by-step approach to diagnosing, investigating, and then going on to the management of the various conditions that you’re going to see in primary care. What it illustrates well is the management of hypertension or high blood pressure where it gives you all the parameters for the different stages of high blood pressure and tells you what investigations you need to do and what treatment you need to give to the various populations within your community.
Evernote
Evernote isn’t a medical application but it does enhance your day-to-day work. Evernote is a dynamic note-keeping app and it can be used for various professions. How to use Evernote for day-to-day, if you come across a really handy guideline or sitting in a lecture theater and they’re giving out notes you are likely to either lose that note or throw it away so instead what you do is take a snap on my phone and then save it into Evernote with a title telling you to read or do whatever. Evernote acts as a quick reference in the future if you are looking for that niche bit of information.