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Four Free Online Tools For Nurses & Health Professionals

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Nurses and other health professionals who are devoted to increasing their knowledge and skills know that in medicine, you never stop learning. Research leads to new information and helps practitioners develop new techniques in caring for the sick and injured.

Members of the medical community will want to take advantage of these four free online tools to help them in their careers.

Pill Identifier

When a patient comes into a healthcare facility and is incoherent or otherwise unable to effectively communicate details about his condition, nurses and other medical professionals will want to know what kinds of pills the patient has been taking. If a nurse has the patient’s pill but is not able to locate the container that lists the prescription information, including the name of the medicine, the dosage instructions, and any side effects or other concerns, he can use the free Pill Identifier website.

Users select a color and shape from the pull-down menus and type in the imprint information from the pill, such as a series of identifying letters or numbers. Clicking the “Search” button gives a result to help identify the pill in question.

MedTerms

As science advances, healthcare professionals are required to learn more and more medical terminology. No one can be expected to remember every term that relates to medicine, so nurses will want to take advantage of the MedTerms tool at MedicineNet.

Healthcare professionals can browse the MedTerms medical dictionary by clicking on letters of the alphabet. They can also type in unfamiliar terms and search for their meanings to get immediate results. Anyone who is uncertain about the spelling of a term can simply type in the first few letters and then an asterisk to improve the search results.

TeachMe: Medical Spanish for Health Care Professionals

Many patients who only speak Spanish come into doctor’s offices, clinics, emergency rooms, and ambulances. Healthcare professionals who are not fluent in Spanish need to quickly figure out what to say when no translator is available. Nurses and other healthcare providers can use the TeachMe: Medical Spanish for Health Care Professionals website and use its free online medical Spanish tool. TeachMe offers important Spanish medical terms, including questions and answers that are frequently used in a medical environment. This is useful when conducting a clinical interview, taking a medical history, or explaining to a patient and her family the details of a medical procedure or treatment.

National Health Observances Toolkits

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintains the Healthfinder website, which offers nurses and other healthcare professionals access to National Health Observances (NHO) toolkits. NHOs range from days to month and are devoted to raising awareness in the public about a variety of health issues. Using free online tools helps professionals organize health-related events in their local communities, spread the word about vital health topics, and promote useful resources to interested parties.

For example, the World AIDS Day toolkit provides a sample announcement and examples of tweets that you can use to get out the message. You can also access the NHO calendar, which lists more than 175 National Health Observances, complete with updated information and various materials that you and your organization can use in your outreach efforts.

Healthcare professionals who have access to the Internet stand to benefit greatly from the free online tools that organizations make available. Whether you are using a desktop computer, a laptop, a smartphone, or another portable device, help, and information is only a few clicks away.