Drug Handbooks / Guides

[Dustdevil]

This is aimed mainly at the nurses and physicians here. I need to order a new drug guide. Unfortunately, I can't run down to the med school bookstore and thumb through the dozen different handbooks available out there to see which I really like best. I'm hoping you guys have worked with some different ones and can offer me some advice on which you like best and why. They all cost about the same, around $40 usd, so that's not a factor.

At my previous base, we had three drug books floating around. We had a Nursing 2005 (Springhill), a Davis' Drug Handbook for Nurses, and the Physicians Drug Handbook by Springhouse. The Nursing 2005 (now 2007, of course) book seems to be the most popular one, as I see it in the most ERs, but personally I didn't care that much for it. The info is good, but it's got a really weird layout that isn't very intuitive, making it hard to find what you are looking for quickly. I like the Davis guide a lot, but I don't have anything but the (now 2007, of course) to compare it to. That's why I am looking for some more input.

There are also these nursing drug guides out there that I am hoping some of you may have used:

• Mosby

Lippincott

Prentice Hall

Saunders

Springhouse

PDR Nurses Drug Handbook

• I briefly used the Physicians Drug Handbook owned by another nurse at my last base and loved it! And, quite frankly, my practice here is much more physician-like than nursing-like. However, from what I can tell on the net, 2005 is the most recent printing, which I am not comfortable with.

Any advice or recommendations?

[akroeze]

I have only ever used to Mosby and flipped through the Lippincott guides so that's all I can comment on.

Short answer is that between those two I definitely prefer the Mosby pocket guide. It seemed to be easier to use and (I have nothing to prove this) more thorough. It's what I used all through nursing school and I loved it. Of course, with any pocket guide there are going to be drugs missing from it. That will be my one comment, when using the Mosby guide in school I found that somewhat frequently drugs I wanted to look up were not in there. Now, if this is a situation unique to Mosby or not I don't know so it may not be a factor to deciding.

I am assuming you will have your drug bible (Whatever the American equivalent of the CPS is) there as the final word?

[BushyFromOz]

Id like to help but basically anyone outside ther US or Canada basically gets screwed on medical texts - especially when it comes to pocket guides :?

[cotjockey]

If you have a PDA, epocrates is a really good one to download. The free version is adequate about 99% of the time and if you pay one of the paid versions, it has a lot of features like dosage calculators, herbal meds, narcotic conversion charts, etc. My favorite print version is either Davis (which I'm not sure is updated yearly...it didn't used to be) or the Physician Drug Handbook, which apparently isn't updated yearly either...but, most that I have found that don't update yearly, do it every other year, so this might be the year they update.

Sorry to ramble on...I have a cold and the cold medicine make me a bit dippy.

Ooops...you wanted to know why. I like epocrates because it is quick and compact and it updates almost daily. It also has a "Multi-Check" feature that you can use to see how drugs might be interacting, has a dosage calculation feature, and it lists a ball park figure for how much drugs cost, which is something a lot of my patients are concerned about when something new is ordered. If a drug isn't covered by insurance or costs too much or isn't available, it has a list of alternatives. It doesn't list nursing implications and interventions, which would be nice to have.

Davis is the one we used in nursing school. I think I just got used to it and since I haven't seen one in several years, I don't even remember what it is like. The Physician Drug Handbook is the one that the ER here used. I think maybe I was just used to it too because nothing really stand out that I liked about it.

Not a lot of help, am I?