India · All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi · civil-service · secondary source
Two stages, both computer-based: Prelims then Mains. Prelims: 100 questions. Mains: 100 questions.. Prelims: 90 minutes.
The main graduate recruitment examination for nursing officer posts across AIIMS and many other Indian public hospitals. Prelims splits 20 questions of general knowledge and aptitude against 80 on the nursing syllabus. Mains is entirely nursing, weighted towards case-scenario questions testing clinical competence rather than recall. Negative marking is one third of a mark throughout.
Official source: https://www.pw.live/nursing/exams/aiims-norcet
The questions are the end-of-manual checks written with each SUNYRA nursing manual. An examination's practice paper draws on the subjects that examination's published blueprint covers; the questions were written to the subject, not to the examination's own pattern, and none is a past paper.
1. A patient's sacral skin stays red when pressed rather than blanching. What does this indicate?
A. Tissue damage has already begun
Skin that does not blanch and refill has already sustained damage, and it is the sign that precedes a visible break. On darker skin the redness may be invisible entirely, so the earlier signs are a patch that feels warmer, cooler, firmer or more painful than the skin around it — a system relying on seeing redness misses damage in dark-skinned patients systematically.
Nursing Foundations I · End-of-manual check
2. When should the position of a feeding tube be confirmed?
D. Before every feed, medicine and flush
A tube that has moved delivers feed into a lung, which is among the most serious avoidable harms in ward nursing. Being correctly placed yesterday is not evidence about today, and coughing, vomiting or pulling at it are all reasons to check again.
Nursing Foundations II · End-of-manual check
3. Why does listening precede palpation in abdominal assessment, unlike elsewhere?
B. Pressing on the abdomen alters the bowel sounds
Palpation stimulates the bowel and changes the sounds you are about to assess, so listening first is the only way to hear them undisturbed. The order everywhere else is look, feel, listen — the abdomen is the deliberate exception, and knowing why prevents it being forgotten.
Health Assessment and Physical Examination · End-of-manual check
4. A nurse is interrupted while drawing up an intravenous antibiotic. What is the safest action on returning to the task?
D. Restart the check sequence from the prescription
An interruption empties working memory, so the step a nurse believes they reached is not reliably the step they actually reached — which is how doses get repeated or components omitted. Resuming from memory relies on exactly the faculty that was just disrupted. A colleague cannot know the step either. Checking afterwards cannot detect a component already added twice.
Medication Administration and Safety · End-of-manual check
5. A nurse wears gloves to reposition a patient, removes them, and moves directly to the next bed. Which precaution has been missed?
D. Hand hygiene after glove removal
Hands are contaminated during glove removal and gloves can be perforated without the wearer noticing, so hand hygiene is required after every removal. Gloves reduce contamination; they never replace decontamination, and the belief that they do is one of the most common causes of transmission on a ward.
Infection Prevention and Control · End-of-manual check
These notes are free to read here, with no account.
What the Laisha app adds:
Free for ten days, then a subscription. We would rather write that here than have you find it later.