Understand how to improve your confidence and competence when using maths as part of your nursing role. Use this resource to learn more about the importance of having sound maths skills for the provision of safe nursing care.

• Safety in numbers

Develop your maths skills with this step-by-step method to facing number challenges at work. Using the acronym ‘PEACE’, learn how to plan, estimate, approach, calculate and evaluate your answer.

• Tackling number problems
• Step 1: Plan - what are you trying to do?
• Step 2: Estimate - what does a sensible answer look like?
• Step 3: Approach - how are you going to solve the problem?
• Step 4: Calculate
• Step 5: Evaluate your answer

When administrating medication to patients in small doses, prescriptions are commonly written in grams and milligrams. Use this resource to build your knowledge and confidence when it comes to converting metric units accurately.

• Metric units
• Converting between metric units
• Converting between very large and very small numbers
• Converting from imperial to metric units

Learn the skills needed to estimate the answer to a number problem before you calculate it. This resource looks at how to spot mistakes with calculating doses and why simplifying the numbers will help you to reach the correct answer.

• Estimation
• Find the upper limit
• Dosage
• Simplify the numbers

Find out more about how to calculate the right amount of liquid medicine to give a patient. Use practice examples to help you with your approach and explore the two main ways of calculating dosage, using mental arithmetic or a formula.

• Dosage for liquid medicine
• Mental arithmetic and using a formula
• Strengths and concentrations

Learn more about how to calculate the required dosage of tablets to give to a patient, using the ‘PEACE’ problem-solving method. This resource looks at the different ways you might use mental arithmetic to work out and check your answer.

• Dosage for solid medicine
• Mental arithmetic and using a formula
• Evaluate

Increase your knowledge when it comes to calculations relating to giving fluid medicines over a period of time (continuous infusions), for example, drugs provided intravenously through an IV line.

• Flow rate and IV drugs
• Plan
• Estimation
• Approach
• Calculate
• Evaluate
• Calculating the duration of an infusion
• An example for you to try