Surgical Pharmacology introduces the pharmacological concepts and principles used in patient care management as they apply to the operating room. It covers the administration of therapeutic medications including indications and contraindications, the effects of drugs on the body systems, drug classifications and mechanisms of action, and — the emphasis distinctive to this course — accurate identification of drugs and doses handled by the surgical technologist on the sterile field.
Within the SCNS taxonomy, STS is the Surgical Technology prefix. STS2340 sits in the second year of the program, taken alongside the surgical procedures sequence — Daytona State pairs it with STS2324 as a corequisite — and requires STS1302. It publishes at 2 credits, offered in fall. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions.
The scoping is important and is what distinguishes this from a nursing pharmacology course. A surgical technologist does not administer medications to patients. What the technologist does is receive, prepare, label, and hand medications on the sterile field — and that narrow set of tasks is where a specific and serious class of error occurs.
The single most important practice in surgical medication safety, and the source of a well-documented category of serious harm.
On a sterile field, medications are transferred into unlabeled basins, cups, and syringes. Several clear liquids are indistinguishable by appearance — saline, local anesthetic, contrast, antiseptic, and other agents — and injecting the wrong one has caused permanent injury and death. Cases involving injection of an antiseptic or a preparation solution mistaken for a local anesthetic are documented and have driven the current standards.
The requirements that follow, which AORN and national patient safety standards specify:
This is a case where the rule seems bureaucratic until you know the cases behind it. It is not bureaucratic.
Florida does not license surgical technologists, and the boundary here comes from the role rather than a practice act. The surgical technologist does not administer medications to a patient. The technologist receives medications onto the field, prepares and labels them, and hands them to the surgeon, who administers.
Two adjacent points. The circulator and the technologist verify together — the verification is a shared, deliberate act, not a formality, and a technologist who accepts a medication onto the field without confirming it has skipped the control. And a technologist may not accept an unlabeled or unidentified medication onto the field, regardless of who is handing it over or how busy the room is. Declining is correct.
Two pieces of pharmacology with immediate operating-room relevance.
Local anesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST) occurs when local anesthetic reaches the systemic circulation in sufficient quantity — through overdose or inadvertent intravascular injection — and it progresses from perioral numbness, tinnitus, and metallic taste to seizures and cardiac arrest. Maximum safe doses are weight-based and are genuinely limiting, particularly with bupivacaine, which is more cardiotoxic than lidocaine. A technologist who knows the concentration and volume passed contributes to the running total the anesthesia provider is tracking.
Epinephrine in local anesthetic causes vasoconstriction, which reduces bleeding, prolongs the block, and slows systemic absorption — raising the maximum safe dose. That is why "with epi" and "plain" are different drugs and must be labeled distinctly. Historic teaching cautioned against epinephrine in digits and extremities; that guidance has been substantially revised and is an area where older sources and current practice diverge. Rule 11 applies — verify against current guidance rather than a textbook edition.
A rare, inherited, life-threatening reaction to volatile anesthetic agents and succinylcholine. It kills quickly untreated and is highly survivable when treated immediately with dantrolene. The surgical technologist does not diagnose or treat it, but is part of the response, and speed depends on everyone in the room knowing where the MH cart and dantrolene are before the crisis. Reconstituting dantrolene is labour-intensive and requires many hands, which is exactly why the whole team is involved. The MHAUS protocol is free, posted in most suites, and worth reading beyond what the course assigns.
The calculation content here is arithmetic, and the errors are the familiar ones documented elsewhere in this repository: unit confusion (milligrams versus micrograms, percent concentration versus mg/mL), decimal placement, and failure to sanity-check the result. The defenses are the same: write the units and cancel them; leading zero always, trailing zero never (0.5 mg, not .5 mg; 5 mg, not 5.0 mg); and ask whether the answer is plausible before acting on it.
One conversion specific to this setting is worth knowing cold: a percent solution expresses grams per 100 mL, so 1% lidocaine is 10 mg/mL. Students who do not internalize that cannot compute a running dose total.
Daytona State publishes STS2340 at 2 credits, prerequisite STS1302, corequisite STS2324, offered in fall. The 30 contact hours follows the standard convention for a two-credit lecture course and is consistent with this repository's STS2365C at 1 credit / 30 hours for an integrated course. Confirm on your syllabus.
Assessment is written, covering drug classifications, indications, and — heavily — calculation and field labeling practice. Programs commonly require a high passing standard on medication calculation, and students should treat that as proportionate rather than harsh.
Florida has no licensure requirement for surgical technologists, which makes the credential decisive: most Florida hospitals and surgery centers require or strongly prefer the NBSTSA Certified Surgical Technologist (CST), and CST eligibility requires graduation from a program accredited by ARC/STSA through CAAHEP (or ABHES). Verify accreditation on the accreditor's own public list before enrolling — a graduate of a non-accredited program may be unable to sit the examination at all. Legislation to require certification has been introduced in various states over time; verify current Florida requirements rather than assuming.
Clinical placement requires Level 2 background screening under § 435.04, Florida Statutes, immunizations, drug screening, and CPR.
The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.
One caveat overrides the general rule: surgical technology programs are accredited, lock-step cohorts with sequenced clinical placements, and they accept transfer into the professional sequence rarely and only case by case. Expect to repeat coursework when moving between programs. Note also that surgical technology is offered in Florida both as college credit and as a PSAV clock-hour program; the two are not interchangeable and PSAV coursework does not transfer as college credit.
Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026