United Kingdom · Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), United Kingdom · licensing
Practical examination across stations. 10 stations. Around three hours.
Taken in the UK after passing the CBT, at an approved test centre. Four stations follow assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation around a single scenario and take about an hour. Every station must be passed individually; pass marks are pre-set per station and generally fall between 60 and 90 per cent.
Official source: https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/registration/toc-21/toc-21-test-specification---nursing.pdf
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. How should a patient's identity be confirmed before a procedure?
A. Ask them to state their own name and a second identifier
Asking whether somebody is Mr Singh invites a yes from a person who is unwell, hard of hearing or eager to co-operate. Open questions using two agreed identifiers are the standard, and bed numbers are not identifiers because patients move.
Clinical Skills and Procedures · End-of-manual check
5. 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
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