Ways Math is Used in Nursing

Math isn’t a topic that would go along with nursing. Nonetheless, nurses utilize math abilities every single day they are on the job. Whenever a nurse supervises treatment, computes an individual’s height or weight, she must make use of mathematics. Math is essential in nursing and may dictate the efficiency of the treatment the nurses administer.

Medicine Estimate
Nurses who are employed in hospitals need to ensure that the appropriate doses of medicine are given to their patients. The physician’s order will generally require a dosage of medicine that the hospital’s pharmacy doesn’t bring. For instance, a physician may order 150 mg of a treatment that is made only in 100 mg capsules or 300 mg scored capsules. In the event the hospital’s pharmacy only provides 100 mg capsules of the prescription drugs, the nurse must determine the number of tablets should be given to the patient. A wrong computation may endanger the life of the patient.

Patient Weight and height
Nurses must determine patients’ height as well as weight. The measuring procedure is usually basic and requires only basic math skills, some healthcare amenities demand nurses to convert the weight in kilos to pounds and also the height in inches to centimeters to the patient’s chart.

Inventory
Regardless of the hospital the nurse decides to be employed, he or she must handle inventory of some sort. Hospital floor nurses who are accountable for major patient care also handle the inventory of their patients’ medicines. Operating room nurse practitioners are accountable for inventory of working room supplies, and wound treatment nurses are accountable for stock of wound care items. The math necessary in these situations is comparable to that of fundamental accounting.

Experiential Learning: An Effective Teaching Strategy for Mathematics

Mathematics is undeniably a hard subject. Even the great minds of the past such as Albert Einstein know for a fact that there are difficulties in learning the matter. No wonder Math teachers experience difficulties in the way they teach students. The lecture approach where teachers let students memorize mathematical facts has long been gone. Today, teachers are called on to teach new and effective teaching methods to develop not only mastery, but comprehension as well.

Mathematics requires experiential learning where students are involved in their own understanding of mathematical concepts and practices. Through this type of learning, students are able to identify problems, use constructive reasoning to make viable arguments, and applying mathematics in real-life problems.

On improving mathematical concepts, a recent study explained that problem solving in mathematics is not a natural talent, but learned. The teacher’s role is to guide students through practice, provide both routine and non-routine problems, and help them develop their own strategies in solving those problems. In addition, the study highlights the importance of including the students in developing skills in problem solving and sharing them through argumentative discussions.

Traditionally, math textbooks often just provide fixed examples without providing rich experiences in problem solving. Teachers too often review the answers immediately without explaining what strategies students use to solve the problems or if the solutions can be explained by the students themselves.

For teachers to build their students’ mathematical problem solving strategies, they need to provide instruction that explores new concepts through scaffolding. Scaffolding includes asking guide questions that lead to answers rather than supplying them immediately.

In regards to experiential learning at the high school level, teachers need to focus on reasoning and acquire a sense of using mathematics on their daily lives. This is because U.S. high school students have the inability to apply math to solve problems in a variety of situations. This trends needs to be improved through experiential learning.

Importance of Mathematics in Health Care Support

Mathematics has a big role, not just in school, but in our daily lives as well. We may not be aware that from time to time, we use math in our daily activities. It is a fact that some fields or professions require math way over others. However, understanding how to do some essential and basic calculations is definitely necessary, no matter what job path you choose to take. This is also true if your profession is health care related. You are likely to work alongside other professionals, for example doctors and nurses, even though you will not be directly handling shots or medication, you still need math abilities to be able to thrive within the area. Otherwise, you may find it hard to obtain this type of position. Fortunately, these mathematical abilities aren’t excessively complicated and you’ll not be requested to do complex calculus algorithms.

In medical billing, typing billing information is essential; because it allows not just the patient to understand how much they have to pay, but the insurance company as well. If you input these details improperly it may lead to big trouble. To prevent any kind of complications and altercations regarding money situations, it is crucial to possess math abilities to be able to correctly accumulate information, take away obligations and input the information right into a spreadsheet along with other software program.

Occasionally, you’ll be required to supply detailed instructions for patients. It is usually recommended that you carry out the calculations; the patient must not do it on their own or it may cause some complications. You’ll learn just how to do this all by completing a pharmacy specialist course or with nursing unit clerk courses, which will assist you in your mission to be in any health care support position. When you won’t need extensive calculations, having fundamental mathematics abilities is essential during this type of area.

Is Mathematics Important in Healthcare?

You may be wondering why nursing and medical students need to study mathematics as a part of their course. We thought that nurses, physicians and other health care professionals must only study clinical procedures, treatments, medicines, anatomy and physiology. But the truth is math is incorporated into the daily lives of the health care professionals. Doctors and nurses use math when they write prescriptions or administer medications.  Medical professionals use math when drawing up statistical graphs of epidemics or success rates of treatments.

We are aware that doctors write prescriptions for their patients for various sicknesses. These prescriptions show a particular medication and dosage amount.  Usually, medicines have recommendations for dosage amounts in mg (mg) per kilogram (kg).  Doctors need to determine the number of mg of medicine each patient will require, based on how much they weigh.  When the weight of the patient is just known in pounds, doctors have to convert that measurement to kilos and then compute the amount in mg for that prescription.  There’s a really large distinction between mg/kg and mg/pounds, so it’s imperative that doctors learn how to precisely convert.

Doctors should also figure out how a prescription can last. They must be able to determine how long the medication will stay in the patient’s body. This is important, because through this, the patient will be aware about the interval of the medication. This can figure out how frequently the individual must take their medication to be able to keep an adequate amount of the medication in the body.

Mathematics plays a vital role in medicine. Since people’s lives are involved, it is crucial that nurses and doctors be really accurate with their mathematical calculations.  Numbers will give information to doctors, nurses, as well as patients.  Numbers are very essential within the medical area. Math is a crucial player within the healthcare arena. Medical companies must obtain reliable data and information to avoid, identify and treat medical conditions. Mastery of the tools of health care as well as scientific calculations will provide an efficient and lucrative delivery of services and reduces the chance of medical mistakes that may lead to malpractices and tragedies. The existence of mathematics in the medical theory will assure everyone that our doctors and nurses are properly trained and accurate with their prescription and medication.

Crowd-Funding Mathematics Research

What if your research was financed by 100 unknown people who had read your research offer on the internet and clicked “donate”? You’d feel accountable to write about your research in a more accessible way. You might commit to provide monthly up-dates to your customers instead of delivering them an actual item. Or maybe high-paying contributors could get a 3-D printed physical representation, a software, or access to an application on the internet. While mathematics may not be winning any popularity competitions among the general population, scientific research is still valued enough by the public that researchers are currently using websites like https://experiment.com/. This site is particularly designed to financing scientific research just as websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are designed to help start-up companies. This idea is very attractive since several mathematics education projects are looking for resources through crowd funding:

  • Gary Antonick at the New York Times Numberplay recently lately presented Primo, a mathematical activity designed by Dan Finkel, who weblogs at Math For Love. The experience is based off of thinking of primary factors as corresponding to different colors, enabling even young kids to play the gane and learn basic functions as well as sensible techniques for managing their two pawns.
  • Similarly, the Moebius Noodles weblog is hosting a crowd-funding strategy for Camp Logic, a book that presents teenagers to logic via games and questions. You can review the book for free, which is written by Mark Saul and Sian Zelbo from the Courant Institute’s Center for Mathematical Talent.

Seeing the achievements experienced by these strategies so far will make you think about how this could be a limited remedy to the issues mentioned by Tabatha O’Neil at Mathbabe concerning the decreasing number of studies financed by government resources. One example of a research including mathematics that seems to have involved many people, enough to get their money is OpenWorm. This is a venture that is designed to create a digital worm from scratch by using researcher’s knowledge of the molecular components within the worm.

Mathematics History

In the history of mathematics, there is no lack of debate over the credibility of statistical justifications. Berkeley’s prolonged review of the techniques of the calculus in The Analyst (1734) is one example. Another is the “vibrating string controversy” among Leonhard Euler, Jean d’Alembert, and Daniel Bernoulli, hinging on whether an “arbitrary” continuous function on a real interval could be represented by a trigonometric sequence. Carl Friedrich Gauss is usually acknowledged with offering the first appropriate evidence of the essential theorem of geometry, saying that every non-constant polynomial over the complicated figures has a root, in his doctorate thesis of 1799; but the history of that theorem is especially knotty, since it was not originally obvious what techniques could properly be used to set up the existence of the roots in question. In the same way, when Gauss provided his evidence of the law of quadratic reciprocity in his Disquitiones Arithmeticae (1801), he started with the statement that Legendre’s claimed evidence a few years before contained a serious gap.

Mathematicians have always been reflectively aware of their techniques, and, as evidence increased more complicated in the Nineteenth century, specialized mathematicians became more precise in focusing the part of rigor. This is obvious in, for example, Carl Jacobi’s compliment of Johann Chris Gustav Lejune Dirichlet: “Dirichlet alone, not I, nor Cauchy, nor Gauss knows what a completely extensive statistical evidence is. Rather we understand it first from him. When Gauss says that he has shown something, it is very clear; when Cauchy says it, one can bet as much pro as con; when Dirichlet says it, it is certain…” (quoted by Schubring21).

Mathematics has, at crucial junctures, designed in more speculative methods. But these times are usually followed by corresponding times of retrenchment, examining fundamentals and progressively implementing a tight deductive design, either to take care of obvious issues or just to make the content simpler to educate convincingly.

Communicating Mathematics

Does talking about mathematical ideas keep your viewers bored?  Does writing the mathematical areas of an assignment or review make your wheels spin or writer’s block?  It does not need to be this way. Students and experts from many professions are required to regularly create and talk about ideas that contain mathematics ideas.  The following guidelines have been developed to increase your mathematics interaction abilities.

1) Aim to be understood! – Mathematical interaction is just like all other types of interaction. The aim is to successfully express an idea.  Ask yourself: what is the primary concept you want to relay?  Desire to discuss these mathematical ideas in a way that instills knowing, involvement and fascination within your audience.

2) Who is your audience? How
much mathematics do they know? – Tailor your demonstration or review towards the needs, passions and mathematical qualifications of your viewers. If they have just moderate information of mathematics, then it will be of little benefit to talk about the accurate information of innovative mathematical ideas. Rather, keep your concept as simple and appropriate as possible by working on primary, contextualized illustrations and special situations which
can be used to light up the “big picture”.

3) Motivate first! Then present the mathematics. – Begin by featuring the inspiration for the mathematics included within.  For instance: talk about any technical or economic enhancements that have lead from the statistical area under consideration; or some amazing traditional improvements related to the mathematics; or even  an entertaining statistical story. This will contextualize the mathematics to the viewers and fight any potential negative behavior towards the topic, like recognized irrelevance. Once the viewers are inspired and involved, their thoughts are more open and it is possible to talk about the mathematical ideas.

4) Start with easy illustrations and break complicated ideas down! – Audiences tend to best understand mathematics through the demonstration of easy and contextualized illustrations, rather than from subjective ideas. Start with statistical illustrations that are basic, understandable and relevant to your audience’s passions, background and capabilities. If more complicated statistical ideas come later, then break the ideas down into smaller understandable sections.