Whether you’re just starting out as a nurse, you’re the purchasing agent for a nursing school, hospital, or clinic, or you’re a medical facility administrator who wants to make sure your facility’s nursing team has all the right tools, it’s important to be up-to-date with the essential tools nurses need. Be familiar with regular use. Understanding the basic components of a nursing “toolkit” can help you ensure that your team always has access to the most up-to-date and efficient medical equipment that helps them do their jobs and provide the best care and service to patients. Therefore, we suggest that you stay with “Production Medicine” magazine in the rest of this article.
There are several key supplies that a nurse or nursing student needs easy access to on a daily basis. Here are just a few:
14 items of medical equipment needed by nurses
1. Finger pulse oximeter
2. Personal protective equipment
3. Stethoscope
4. Alcohol pad
5. Pressure gauge device
6. Thermometer
7. Medical flashlight
8. Nursing scissors
9. medical tape
10. Clipboard
11. Hand sanitizer and lotion
12. Pens and markers
13. hemostat
14. Reflex hammer
Professional, emotional and physical nursing is extremely challenging. Caring for patients and assisting them with a variety of medical procedures, usually in 12-hour shifts, is not even easy. Nurses spend the majority of these shifts on their feet, moving from patient to patient and tending to their needs, comfort, and recovery. To succeed in this heavy workload, nurses need several items of standard specialized medical equipment, ideally packed into a carrier bag, backpack, or other portable nursing bag so that they can move their kit from patient to patient and to carry from one method to another. Some nurses also like that this bag is big enough to fit their laptop.
Of course, nursing supplies can vary depending on the medical center or nursing school and the specific type of nursing care provided, but there are some basic, everyday supplies that most nurses need. Whether you are getting your nursing school supplies or you are getting nursing supplies for a medical center and hospital, you need to make sure you consider these things.
Now we’ll take a closer look at some of the key supplies that every nurse, nursing school, and medical center should have on hand. Keep in mind that this is all in addition to comfortable scrubs, shoes, socks, and nursing clothes.
