Algebra in Nursing
Math, although it maybe unliked by many students, is essentially to daily life. Math is apart of just about everything we do. It is used to create the cars we come to school in and the toothpaste we use to brush our teeth. It is just as essential to nursing as it is to everyday life. One of the skills required to be a nurse is solving basic linear equations for dimensional analysis.
Dimensional analysis is the process of converting between to measurements. In nursing this can be used to change patient information from the United States standard measurement system to the metric measurement system. This is important in the medical field because the metric system is what is used for measure patient information. If a patient comes in with information in US standard measurements and their must convert their measurements accurately. In nursing and in real life mistakes from dimensional analytical equations can have serious impacts. For example, in 1999 ”NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the… metric system...” (Metric Mishap). Although Nasa had been using the metric system since 1990, this simple misunderstand caused millions of dollars. For nursing it is essential that there are no confusions like this, because it is people's lives in the balance, not robots. A real life nursing example is a doctor tells the nurse that a patient needs 4 mg of morphine and the vial says “10 mg per 1 ml.” Here dimensional analysis would be used to deduce that the patient would be given .4 ml of morphine. Dimensional analysis can also be used in terms of the ratios used to match the patient's unique information. For example, Lasix, commonly used to treat hypertension, is given to adults starting at 40 mg tw...
