maternal child student needing some help

[medfostercare]

I am having a time with the way they are wording the tests....I need help..real help I am repeating this maternal child ....the first test I got an A this second test just made a passing grade with 75....due to the fact that I could not pick the best answer ...what do you do when the question has two great answers....and how do I fix myself enough to pass this dang class?

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

students occasionally post questions asking for people's ideas about what the right answer might be all the time on the student forums. one of the things that i've often noticed about them is that they frequently involve knowing either where the situation lies along the continuum of the nursing process for that particular scenario or understanding how a disease process progresses from beginning to the end in order to identify which symptoms are worse than others and need attention before others. with the nursing process questions you have to know the 5 steps of the nursing process and decide where the scenario fits into the nursing process. one thing that generally trips students up the most is that you cannot begin to perform any nursing interventions until an assessment has been made of the patient. so, if you get a question where "the patient tells you they are nauseated. your first action would be to:" assess the patient, determine their abnormal symptoms, then develop nursing interventions for the abnormal symptoms you find. hopefully, one of the answer choices will be one of those. if you have (1) give an antiemetic or (2) assess abdomen for bowel sounds as answer choices, you would choose #2 because you must assess first. the stem of the question is only giving you the patient's subjective symptom and nothing else. nursing instructors know that this nursing process will get you every time. students do not spend near enough time learning or attempting to understand it. yet, it is the one concept that you should know and know in your sleep by the time you graduate. as for the priorities of nursing actions, those are often based upon flat out knowledge and memorization of the disease process going on as well as an understanding of what organs are likely to die off first if not immediately attended to. maslow nailed this. the body needs (in this order) oxygen (brain, lung, heart, other organs), water, food (protein, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, vitamins) or it dies. these are the physiological needs.