At $29.99 the Nursing Spectrum Drug Handbook's 5th Edition is the most expensive app I have bought for my iPad or iPhone, that being said I would have no problem making that purchase again.

The reason that I say this is it has some fantastic features. The book has many of the features that you would expect from a print version of a drug pocket guide:

• Basic drug information (actions, availability, indications and dosage, contraindications, precautions, administration, adverse reactions, patient monitoring, and patient teaching)
• Information on safe drug administration (Injection sites, monitoring blood levels, drug prep/handling/admin, and preventing extravasation)
• Photographic gallery of common tablets and capsules
• Valuable clinical information

In addition to these features this application also takes your basic drug guide information and makes it searchable and light weight. The developers also included a more information and great images, as well as a fun function that give you a random drug of the day. If you look at the pictures below the app is quite simple, making it straight forward and easy to use.

Another feature I liked is that you can bookmark certain drugs. I know when I was working on a multi-organ transplant floor there were a ton of drugs that I would only come across infrequently. Having the list of drugs used on my floor makes it easier to access informations on certain drugs and check important information, such as drug compatibility.

When looking at the information given for each drug I found that I liked this application because it went beyond the medical information and provided the important information for nurses and patient education. This app would have been a huge benefit to me as a nursing student, and I definitely would recommend it to any floor nurse that is looking to stop carrying a textbook on the floor every shift.

My only criticism that I had to offer for this app is that it is pretty cut and dry. When I think about drug medication I often get flashbacks to learning to calculate drip rates, and trying to remember what the correct gtt. Adding something as simple as a drug calculator to this application would make this application even more useful and prevent me from having to exit the application in order to open another application with the capability.