Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Nursing Pharmacology: Antibiotics Cephalosporins made easy #nclex

hi everyone we're back again with another antibiotic in our pharmacology

series and today we're gonna be speaking about the cephalosporins

so before we get started we'll start with our medical disclaimer you can

actually pause the video and read it we usually put the disclaimer up because as

nurses and nurses to be safety safety is always a priority so cephalosporins

our antibiotics that treat gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria they're

considered to be broad-spectrum antibiotics and the way they work is

that they bind to the bacterial cell wall and it causes the cell that has the

bacteria in it to die because cephalosporins

are broad-spectrum they are used to treat a variety of different infections

so we have pneumonia urinary tract infection is used for tonsillitis it's

used for gonorrhea it's used to treat a broad array of illnesses infections so

one of the easiest way to identify a cephalosporin is to actually look at the

prefix of the name and you would see with cephalosporines they all start

with CEF CEF or Cee pH so you have Cefdinir cefalexin ceftriaxone cefazolin

so they have this CEF beginning to their name and

that's like a little memory tip for you because the cephalosporins starts with

the Ceph sound alright so cephalosporins can be given by the intravenous or IV

route intramuscular or IM route or oral and you will see that written as PO

because we still use some Latin terms in our everyday medical language and

PO simply means per OS by mouth the side-effects of cephalosporins I have

a little memory tip here for you and it's hairy Cephalosporins can

increase your blood sugar level allergic reactions one of the big testing area

with particularly Cephalosporins and another class of antibiotic that we will

discuss in another video it's allergic reactions and allergic

reactions can be mild or they can be severe and life-threatening right so it

can really great if it can go from something mild you know like a small

rash all the way up to laryngeal edema and close up your airway which is

definitely life-threatening insufficient platelets

did you know cephalosporin cause bone marrow suppression yes yes

so that leaves your clients at risk for blood clots okay and previously I told

you that cephalosporins can be given by the IV route it can be given

intravenously so you have to monitor your clients IV site right because you

know the client is at risk for blood clots renal problems cephalosporin is

excreted through the urine so it can be heavy it can be hard on your kidneys to

get rid of cephalosporins how do we monitor your patients renal function

what are the two labs that we would look at what labs what labs would we look

at to monitor your clients renal function yes yes you're right

the bun and creatinine yes those are two two labs that we would look at yellow

poop diarrhea a side effect of the cephalosporins our diarrhea and the

cephalosporins are known for causing a special type of diarrhea called c-diff

diarrhea Clostridium difficile diarrhea so we have to

monitor our patience for changes in their bowel movements and diarrhea if

they're having diarrhea something that I need to bring your attention to and this

is just it this is not unique to cephalosporins this is for all

medication GI disturbances any medication that is taken by the oral

route because it has to go through your gastrointestinal system your patient

will experience some form of GI disturbance and the GI t service can be

nausea vomiting it can be diarrhea it can be anorexia there are some

medications that actually leave like a metallic taste in your mouth you have a

funny taste in your mouth there's some diarrhea that I mean some medications

that cause constipation so any medication that you take by the oral

route has the ability to cause some sort of GI disturbance and that's a good

memory tip for you to remember for all oral antibiotics some special

considerations with cephalosporins before you start any antibiotic

treatment the doctor is going to order a culture and sensitivity tests for your

clients and we do this test before your client starts their anti biotic therapy

so usually they would order the test and the doctor typically would have you

start a broad-spectrum antibiotic before the results come back and we do this

because we want to get your client starting to feel better we want to get

this bacteria that's May the person sick out of them and then

after they get the results from the culture and sensitivity the doctor may

actually change from a broad-spectrum antibiotic to a more specific antibiotic

depending on the bacteria that shows up in the culture and sensitivity we need

to ask our client about allergy history even if there's allergy history in the

chart or you might have asked the client before maybe earlier in your shift you

will go back and you will double-check allergy history and the reason why we do

that is because there is a cross allergy between cephalosporins

and penicillin so we really want to check with our clients regarding any

history of penicillin allergy because if the person has an allergy to penicillin

they're also going to have an allergy to cephalosporins

because you know of the cross allergy between them right and a good memory tip

for that is that we don't give the sailings the steps we don't get the sets

with the ceilings okay so that's just a little memory tip so now let's say you

give your patient on a dose of their cephalosporin and then they're having an

allergic reaction what would you do do you know what to do well what you would

do is you would hold and so you would stop and hold the medication right and

then the next thing that you're gonna do you're gonna assess your a patient to

see exactly what they're allergic reaction is right so your assessment you

know may involve you inspecting them you may have to auscultate the lungs because

you want to know if this is affecting the person's own respiratory status you

have to your client is the is declining and then

if they're having a really severe allergic reaction the antidote that we

are going to use is epinephrine right the antidote for the allergic reaction

you know is epinephrine right

cephalosporins are one of the classes of antibiotics

that should be taken with food because if you take your cephalosporin on an

empty stomach is going to decrease the effectiveness of the medication so your

client would not experience the maximum benefits of the medication if they take

it on an empty stomach we do not want our clients consuming alcohol while

they're taking cephalosporins because it causes a disulfiram like reaction in the

client and that is not a very pleasant feeling they'll have you know it may

present us headache muscle cramps dizziness vomiting so we also want to

question our clients also about their alcohol consumption because let's say

your client came through the emergency room and they're intoxicated we would

want to make sure that we're not gonna give them a cephalosporin because we're

gonna get this die so from like reaction and the doctor would have to order a

different class of medication for your clients we do not want to give

cephalosporins to clients with renal impairment because cephalosporins

is excreted through our urine so if the person has kidneys that are impaired we

don't want to add a cephalo Assefa cephalosporin

to this because it's going to make their kidney function even worse so we would

not give it to someone that has problems with their kidneys we do not want to

administer cephalosporin together with calcium containing products because this

can also decrease the effectiveness of the medication we want to teach our

client to take the entire course of their medication regimen even if they

are feeling better and the reason we would want to do this is because the

medication killed off some of the bacteria but definitely not all so what

happens the bacteria gets smarter than the medication and the bacteria becomes

resistant and their medication antibiotic does not work anymore right

so then your client will then have to get a different treatment a different

class of antibiotics to treat the infection that they have and we

definitely don't want that we have to teach our clients especially our

diabetic clients that suffering can cause hyperglycemia and false urine

glucose tests so we want to let our diabetic client know that they may need

to monitor their blood sugar a little more frequent while they're on their

course of cephalosporins we also want to teach clients that

cephalosporins can cause false positive opioid tests so that way they don't get

alarmed if something like that is to occur we also want to teach our client

to watch out for the following signs and symptoms there's like furry overgrowth

on the tone diarrhea that has caused or bloody if they have in vaginal itching

because all of those are signs of a super infection and we don't want our

clients at home trying to treat this super infection that may be developing

while they're on their current antibiotics remember earlier in the

previous slide I told you that cephalosporin caused c-diff diarrhea and

your client would have to get an additional treatment if they develop

this form of diarrhea so that's all our notes that we have for cephalosporins

we'll be back with another class of antibiotics in the series and until then

take care be well good bye