Platform 4: providing and evaluating care
15 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes.
Platform 4 is the widest category in Part B and the closest to a shift. Common conditions and how they are managed, medicines and what they do, the devices you look after, and what you do when somebody deteriorates in front of you.
What this section asks about
- Commonly encountered physical and mental health conditions and their management
- Safe administration of medicines, and the pharmacology behind them
- Allergies, interactions, contraindications and monitoring
- Devices and lines: catheters, cannulae, stomas, tracheostomies, syringe drivers
- First aid, basic life support and the immediate management of an emergency
- Symptom management, comfort and care at the end of life
- Evaluating whether an intervention worked
Where the marks go
15 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes. The NMC splits this section across the levels of Bloom's taxonomy:
- Remember and understand: 5
- Apply and analyse: 5
- Evaluate and create: 5
Where candidates lose marks
- Answering with a treatment when the question asks what the nurse does first.
- Skipping the observation. Many of these questions are answered by assessing the patient and escalating, not by an intervention.
- Learning drug facts without the monitoring. Questions ask what you check as often as what you give.
Questions people ask
- How much pharmacology do I need?
- Enough to recognise what a medicine is for, what it commonly does that is unwanted, and what you monitor. You are not asked to prescribe.
- Which resuscitation guidance does the CBT follow?
- UK practice, which means Resuscitation Council UK. Compression depth, rate and the compression to ventilation ratio are all fair game.
Practise this section
Practice is filtered by section, so you can work on this one on its own. Every account gets 10 new questions a day without a card.