NEWS2 and observations in the OSCE
Written and checked against the NMC’s published sources by The NMCMATE editorial team.Last checked .
Any assessment-style station involves taking observations, and in UK practice those are charted and scored on a NEWS2 chart. NEWS2 is published by the Royal College of Physicians and is a lookup table, not a judgement call, which makes it one of the few things you can learn to do perfectly before you arrive.
The 7 parameters NEWS2 scores
- Respiration rate.
- Oxygen saturation, with a separate scale for patients with hypercapnic respiratory failure.
- Whether the patient is on supplemental oxygen, which scores on its own.
- Systolic blood pressure.
- Pulse.
- Consciousness, recorded as ACVPU: alert, new confusion, voice, pain, unresponsive.
- Temperature.
Where candidates come unstuck
- Scoring the chart correctly and then doing nothing. The score exists to trigger a response, and an assessor is watching for the response.
- Forgetting that new confusion scores. A patient who is confused for the first time is not "alert", and the C in ACVPU is the part most often missed.
- Forgetting that supplemental oxygen adds to the score by itself, separately from the saturation reading.
- Rounding a borderline value to the friendlier band. Read the number that is there.
- Treating a single high parameter as unimportant because the total looks low. One extreme reading is its own trigger.
Common questions
- What does NEWS2 stand for?
- National Early Warning Score 2. It is published by the Royal College of Physicians and is the standard early warning score used across the NHS.
- How many parameters does NEWS2 score?
- 7: respiration rate, oxygen saturation, supplemental oxygen, systolic blood pressure, pulse, consciousness on the ACVPU scale, and temperature.
- Is NEWS2 examined in the NMC OSCE?
- The NMC does not publish a station-by-station content list, so we will not claim it is guaranteed to appear. What is certain is that taking and interpreting observations is core nursing practice, and NEWS2 is how that is charted in the UK.
Practise an assessment station
Talk to a simulated patient and get a marked report against the station criteria.
Simulator attempts come with every access plan, 4 of them with the 99 days plan, which is a full APIE sitting, and in larger packs on their own.
Stations are added and rewritten as the exam guidance changes, and every attempt runs against the current version, so a revision reaches your next station rather than a later edition of something you bought.
This page is one part of the exam. Work through the whole thing with the NMC OSCE pages.