In nursing school, you learned that physicians order treatments and medications for their patients. As a nurse, it is your responsibility to carry out those orders. Therefore, it is important that you learn to read, understand, and transcribe those orders so you administer the proper medication and treatment to your patients.

Orders are given in many ways. You may be most familiar with the written order, which must be written out in the physician’s handwriting. Usually, these orders are written either on a prescription pad, for the patient to take to the pharmacist, or on a physician’s order sheet in a healthcare facility, where it is given to a nurse to transcribe, prepare, and administer to the patient.

The physician may also give orders verbally to a nurse or other healthcare practitioner as designated in the facility in which you work. The physician may be present in the room, or may be calling in by telephone. These orders must be received, or taken by, a qualified healthcare practitioner who writes them on the physician’s order sheet as a verbal (or telephone) order as soon as possible for the physician to sign later.

One of the newest ways by which an order may be delivered is by computer. Some healthcare facilities require the physician to input each order into the hospital computer, where an order sheet is printed out for the nurse administering the medications and treatments. This method reduces the likelihood of errors. As technological advances continue, more and more hospitals will come to use this method.

No matter how you received the order, you will need to know all the parts of the medication order to give the medication correctly. These parts include the

• name of the medication
• amount per dose
• route of the medication
• frequency with which it must be given

Sometimes the physician also gives special instructions, such as requesting that it be given before, with, or after meals, or that one medication must follow another within a specified amount of time. Special instructions usually show up in the abbreviations included in the order, and must be followed exactly.

Editor’s note: This excerpt was adapted from Stressed Out About Drug Math, Second Edition, HCPro, Inc., 2006. For more information on this book and the others in the Stressed Out series, click the book covers on the left side of this page.