In this activity, students are prompted to describe the key nursing care components of the conditions they are learning about in class through connections to music. Each student is assigned one condition and finds songs to describe 3 of 5 topics: assessment, interventions, patient teaching, safety, and nursing considerations. The connection between nursing concepts and lyrics does not have to be exact. Students are encouraged to take creative license and show the group how even seemingly loose connections can illustrate the concepts. Students are encouraged to use songs they already know, instead of web-searching terms such as "songs about leukemia." For example, a student may select the lyric "If I bleed you'll be the last to know" from the Taylor Swift song Cruel Summer1 to illustrate that patients with thrombocytopenia should not let nurses be the last to know they are bleeding. In addition, "Breathe out, so I can breathe you in" in the song Everlong2 by the Foo Fighters might be selected to describe teaching a patient to fully exhale before using an inhaler treatment. This activity helps students create memory links to nursing knowledge and some old favorite songs or new finds. The instructor (or an ambitious student!) may volunteer to make a playlist of the songs on YouTube or Spotify so that class members may listen to the picks as they study the unit topics.
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