As an exercise I rated the 33 drugs I carry in order of their essentialness.
In other words, if every day I had to take one drug off my rig until in the end I only had one left, which drug would I choose each day?
In writing the drug profiles, I tried to imagine I was telling a new preceptee my thoughts and experiences with the various drugs.
Here is the list from most essential to least:
1. Epinephrine
2. Morphine
3. Oxygen
4. Ativan
5. DuoNeb
6. Normal Saline
7. Dextrose
8. Nitroglycerin
9. Narcan
10. Aspirin
11. Amiodarone
12. Atropine
13. Dopamine
14. Zofran
15. Cardizem
16. Adenosine
17. Glucagon
18. Magnesium
19. Benadryl
20. Versed
21. Solu-Medrol
22. Sodium Bicarbonate
23. Calcium
24. Haldol
25. Metoprolol
26. Lidocaine
27. Toradol
28. Activated Charcoal
29. Tylenol
30. Tetracaine
31. Phenergan
32. Vasopressin
33. Lasix
Thanks for putting in the effort on this, much appreciated as I am always looking for more experience provider input.
Thanks for you work on this. I read this site many times at work just to quiz myself and learn from your experiences.
This is good stuff! Thanks for writing it!
I’m wondering if you’ve come across any reference that talk about the quantity of medications use? Say, are there any statistics on the average number of epinephrine 1:10,000 syringes used in a code situation? There are an increasing amount of drug shortages, mostly for our code tray items. We are looking to determine a minimum, safe quantity to include in the trays. We stock the code tray with 10 syringes. We would like to decrease this to 7 syringes. Do you have any thoughts? Any references you could point me to? Thanks.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am studying to become a paramedic and your short ‘stories’ about the drugs make it so much easier for me to remember them all. Thank you!