What are the NCLEX Categories?

Hey guys, what's going on? My name is chance, I'm one of the nurse educators here and we're going to take a look at, um, in clicks categories today. Um, so I know that some of you are near the chat, so if you're near the chat, go ahead and drop a line over here in the chat box and just give me some, uh, you know, let me know where you are in the in journey. Uh, I just want to make sure that we are all on the same page cause this English got a voiceover it really, really important. So I want to make sure that you guys get what you absolutely need to out of this. So I know it's just now two 30. So, uh, I'm going to give it just to do a quick, a few more seconds. Uh, hey guys, what's going on? Um, but uh, let's get rolling into today's topic, which are inklings categories. So how many of you have actually heard of the [inaudible] category?
Not many, right? So in clinics categories, your, your professors might call them like, um, objectives. I know that there are some in cliques prep books on the market that say, Hey, these are, um, these are maybe learning objectives or nursing objectives or kind of basically they're these, uh, these principles that we need to follow. Um, but the thing that we really need to focus on is that the English categories are something that's recommended by the NTSB n but the NTSB n does is they actually go and they create this thing called the [inaudible] test plan. And what they do is every three years they'll go and pull a new nurses, they'll pull 'em, they'll get resources, like expert content, people from the NTSB en, um, and they compile all this test plan and they say, the next three years we're going to test users, um, or candidates on the categories and what are, what it is. I'm going to share my screen with you so you can get a better idea. So let me, yeah,
yeah.
Screening. All right. So let's take a look at these in clicks categories. So first off, so the one we're talking about these in categories, these are the inklings categories. There's four main categories, right? So let's see my pen here. Okay, open the connector. There's these four main categories. And what these categories do is they're broken down into eight, eight essential sub categories. So they look at these, you've got, um, safe and safe and effective care management. Then there is, uh, the, uh, safety and infection control, and there's health promotion and maintenance, psychosocial integrity, physiologic integrity, and that's broken down into these basic care and comfort, the pharmacological and parenteral therapies, reduction of risk potential, and physiologic adaptation. So you've got, uh, what they actually do is break these down into these other subcategories. So you've got management of care, which is one, you've got safety and infection control, just two.
You've got health from health promotion and maintenance, which is three. You've got psychosocial integrity, which is four. And then the other four come from physiologic integrity. So you've got basic care comfort, this five pharmacological and Pernell therapies, which is six, uh, reduction of, uh, risk potential and physiologic annotation. So what do all these means? So if we look over here at this graph, this is actually from the NTSB. In a test plan. And what does that, what this does is it says how many of these are, you're actually gonna see the test. Well, if you look at management of care, it's 20% so that means that about 20% of your test portions or one fifth one out of every five questions is going to be dealing with management of care. And we'll get into like what's included each one of those. If you look at safety, infection control at 12 a health maintenance promotion, psychosocial integrity in basic carrying comfort at nine. And these are kind of just hard numbers, but let's go to the next slide, sorry.
And these are all rough estimates. So I think management cares actually something like 15 to 20% there's a graph. If you go to this NTSB n a site and actually having that pdf, and what it does there is it'll actually show all of these different numbers. So you've got the safety, infection control, and then you go through, so let's see what's in each one of these things. But we look at management of care, what collection number the inklings is designed to figure out if as you take the test, if you're the nurse candidate and you're going to take this test, which if they give you a question on the management of care, they want to make sure that you're going to do things that are within your scope of practice. They're going to make sure you're going to do things that are illegal. They're going to make sure that you do things that are ethical.
Make sure you follow the a and A's code of ethics. They look at things like, are you going to be safe? Are you going to be efficient? Are you going to be prudent at the intro level when they basically, if they turn you loose, are you going to be a problem for society? And what they want to make sure is that you're going to do all of these things. So when we look at management of care, um, back, sorry, um, look at management of care, the thing they're gonna look at it, they're gonna look at things like advanced directive, self determination in life planning. So if you have a patient that needs an advanced directive, do you know what's in an advanced directive? Do you understand the legal and ethical implications of, um, I'm an advanced directive. And then when we're talking about advocacy, do you know when to advocate for your patient?
So what does that mean for you? Does that mean that if you have a patient, for instance, that is, um, let's say they're unconscious, they're restraint and a provider wants to do a surgery, right? So, um, but you, you need their consent and there is no one there to consent. There's no advanced directives. Um, and the, uh, they're going to do it without the proper documentation. You're going to be additive to the patient and say, Hey, there's no way I'm gonna do that. For instance, one time I had a, a physician, a new brand new resident. Uh, he wanted to give him a heart failure patient about a liter of fluid for bullets. And I was like, you can't do that. He's all heart failure. I'm advocating for my patients. So same thing. You're also gonna look at things like assigning delegation supervision. So if I, if I assign something to a UAP, does that mean that that UAP is going to do things that are in the scope of practice?
Am I allowed to delegate that task? That's what they're looking at. They want to make sure that you're not going to say, Hey, will you go do an assessment on the patient because it's not in the scope of practice for UAV case management. This goes along with this other thing of, um, like concepts of management. How do I manage cases? How do I refer, how do I do an admission? How do we do a transfer? Um, how do I manage, uh, like especially with an interdisciplinary team, how do I deal with conflict? Those are the things we're looking at with management of care, continuity of care. This is admissions, discharges and transfers. How am I going to go ahead and get this patient out of, um, out of where they're going to, where they need to go? I'm establishing priorities. So this is part of the nation amongst, um, amongst multiple patients.
So, which, which patient do I see first? Right. So this is the one who I see first when we talk about other MacPractice legal responsibilities. Then it talks about it. So this is documentation. That's what, that's what they're looking at there. And then looking at things like quality improvement, quality assurance, uh, do things like RCA root cause analysis. If these things are needed to be done, is it going to be done? How are you going to handle it? Remember this is like 20% of those questions. So one of every five is going to deal with this. Such a huge list. So it's look at the next one. The safety and infection control are two things that that in clicks wants to know whenever you come in. First off, are you going to be a safe nurse and are you going to um, do things like for this one?
Um, are you going to be prudent? Meaning if I'm a prudent nurse, that means I want you to decrease the likelihood of infection for my patients. So if I look at things like accident and error and injury protection, am I going to do things for my patient that's going to keep them safe? Uh, so like, uh, reducing fall risks, right? So I have a patient has dementia, they're in a bed, what can be done to, uh, alert the nurse and we move closer to the nurses' station per turn on the bed alarm and put unnecessary bedrooms. So those are things that it also deals with like disaster and emergency response, ergonomic principles. So this is like transferring a patient. Um, if I transfer a patient, um, in and out of the bed, uh, in and out of a chair and do it, my doing it in a safe way, that's not going, we to actually injure the, the nurse and we talk about handling hazardous and infectious material, uh, we're talking about, goes down to the standard for Carson.
So you, things like TV or flu or, um, or MRI to say that's what these things are looking at. And so the other thing about this is it actually looks at, um, if unwilling to, uh, also if there's a potential, um, fall, right? So how do I report it? How do I, uh, how do I deal with on reporting a fall, a one by document, that kind of substance, that's what the safety and infection control looks at. Um, let's see. Pretend I've done this one is going to be for this one is 12%. So about, uh, you're looking at like one out of every like six or seven questions is going to be, so this is like 12%, I think is what I said, right? So 12% of these questions are gonna come in the safety and infection control, health promotion and maintenance. But this is dealing with like development across the lifespan.
So if we look at development, so these are going to be things like growth and development. This is also going to be dealing with things like maternal fetal nursing. And um, so this is where you're, um, um, we're all your ob and peds come in when you're talking about [inaudible]. All of these are gonna be here and in here. So you get back and you've got the transitions. Also, this has to do with community health is another big one. So you've got disease prevention, health promotion, health screening, reducing high risk behaviors, making sure your patients are making lifestyle style choices. What they want to know here in this category is saying, Hey, look, if we give you the concept on, if we give you this concept on, um, on, let's say my patient has, um, let's say my patient has HIV, right? And we want to make sure that they're going to make good choices about their, let's say their HIV positive.
So what does that mean? Well, that means that you have to educate your patient. That means that you have to make sure that they understand the risks of HIV. So now we have, now we're dealing with like different types of infectious disease. We're dealing with different types of transmission. We're dealing with, hey, my patient needs to understand that, um, transmitting HIV is, uh, may, may or may not be limited to certain things. Uh, so this is what we're talking about. We're also evaluating our patients for self care. We want to make sure that they can provide self care. This also is your area of, so a physical assessment. This is different than your, like your comprehensive health assessment, but they want to know is can you physically assess this patient? So, um, and this one, this, uh, for this category it's gonna take a, let me give you a good number here. Let me make sure that this is right.
So for health promotion and maintenance, you're looking at like, um, on this one is about six to 12% for questions. So let's go back a little bit. I wanna go back to safety and safety and infection control, but I say 12% is actually, it's more like nine to 15%. This is often the same document, but I'm going to give you a range. And then for management of care, you're looking at 17. They split the difference on these. So 17 to 23%. So in that graph that I showed you, that's actually just rounded up numbers kind of found in the middle. So listen to the next one. So psycho, social integrity, all of our mental health patients, right? This is every or at anybody with sort of stress or illness. Um, so they can, you can be dealing with acute or chronic mental health issues and mental health is not only just patients that have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
This is also dealing with depression, also dealing with anxiety. Um, and these can happen in, no, these can manifest in normal patients that you can have a patient you're taking down to MRI for scanning, they're claustrophobic, they don't have a mental health disorder. What they have is they have anxiety related to some sort of other diagnostic tests. So this is why it's really important here that you made sure that you go ahead and you say things like, or that you, that you're actually going to help your patient and go down here. So we're dealing with that with like stress management and also with, um, I know there's some coping mechanisms. There it is. So this is where it's really gonna help you for those patients. But then you're also worried about for this, for this kind of where you're dealing with abuse. And neglect. This also deals with how do you report it?
How do we, how do we report it? Who should we report it to? When should we report it? That's what this category is for. We also do crisis intervention and cultural awareness. We need to know when we're dealing with special aspects of culture, especially with things like end of life. This is where it's really important. You life is going to impact family dynamics, grief and loss. And then you have, like I said, we have all these mental health concepts. Um, so this is where it's really important to understand that the psychosocial and integrity deals with things related to mental health. How are patients going to, uh, uh, deal with, um, issues related to mental health? And so what the English wants to know is it given if you're given a patient with some sort of a problem associated with their mental health and depression, anxiety and coping stress, a census, abused, um, anything like that, they want to make sure that you're going to educate your patients.
Probably you're going to do things that are safe and prudent and efficient. That's what the eclipse is looking forward for. This category you're looking at again about six to six to 12% here of those questions are actually going to come from this category. Basic Care and comfort. Take care and comfort as part of that one big category of physiologic physiological integrity. Those t cool. A physiologic integrity. And what that is is this is, this is the one that's broken down into four. So basically Karen Comfort is going to be a six to 12% so again, a healthy makes it these with this, what do you want to know is given your patient's condition, can you provide them basic care and comfort? So that means we're dealing with the elimination, we're dealing with nutrition, personal hygiene. Can they move? So this is thinks so think discharge, right? So if I'm going to discharge my patient, can they provide themselves or be provided everything that's in basic caring comfort, can they move?
And if they can't move, are they beginning to proper assist of devices and can they move around safely? That's the question there. So the other thing that you're also going to have to consider are these are things that you can equip your patient with are non-pharmacologic comfort interventions. So this is going to be things like heat, um, ice, um, massage, uh, teach them how to use things like apps are really awesome now and giving patients, uh, the option for guided imagery. Visualization is another one. Um, these are all really important aspects of Basic Karen Conference here. The incurrence wants to know, can you provide basic caring, comfort, um, interventions, uh, safely and effectively to your patients? And so this is going to be that six to 12. So, um, pharmacologic, different oral therapies. So these are things like, um, this is where the inclax wants to know this. Can you give him medication
safely?
That's what the [inaudible] wants to know. Can't if you have to give a patient any sort of medication, can you do it safely? Can you follow the sick patient rights? Can you look at things like, um, potential, um,
uh,
sorry, interactions, drug, drug interactions, right? Um, what about, uh, side effects? Uh, what is going to be the primary Pharmaco? Uh, pharmacologic dynamic, right? Um, meaning, uh, what, how does it actually work in the system? So, oh, can you calculate drugs? That's another one, right? So you've got your drug calculations, right? And can you ex what is the actual expected outcome? What could potentially happen? Can you give your patient a medication appropriately? Also, what if your patient needs a blood product? How do you do this? How do you do it safely? What do we know about how often do I need to take vital signs or what should come first? Like you have to give a blood transfusion. So I gotta make sure I get a vital sign, make sure I'm going to take a cross, make sure, make sure I've got consents. Like these are all important things that have to happen before you give a blood transfusion.
So these things have to happen before. So one of the eclipse do is say, okay, your patient needs a blood transfusion. What should these is going to be the priority for that nurse? What should the nurse, which of these actions should the nurse do first? And if they give you select a lot of time. Cool. So good vital signs. I can get a Krups, make sure consents are signed, that kind of stuff. So that's where that comes into effect. So, and they're going to like paying attention this in front row therapies. So they also want to make sure that you can actually give pain medications at, you can assess your patient for pain properly and you can also do a reassessment which actually comes back to the nursing process. And that's really important. And then also the other thing is I want to make sure that you can give TPN how TPN works, what devices you should use.
Again, like central venous access devices. If your patient is on some sort of presser, they want to make sure that you don't just flush that pressure and drops your patient's pressure. So that's kind of, or positive, I'm sorry, cause their blood pressure despite that sort of pressure does. So a three on some sort of like if they are in shock and they need a vaser presser or if they're on a visa dilator, if you push the cardium drip and you flush the line, aren't you going to drop their blood pressure too much? So that's what they want to know here. So for this category you're looking at about 12 to 18 so there's a larger amount than some of the other categories. And the reason that is is because you're going to be giving a lot of medications so that the English wants to know that you can do that on reduction of risk potential.
This is going to be the category where we're looking at things like diagnostic tests on my buddies. Your patient comes in with an MRI and the Troponin is of greater than 0.05 is that high? Is that low? Maybe they come in and that your proponent is 0.2 that's a, it's a critical Latin. That's a high value, right? So what, you know what units, it's actually the programs, but what, you know, what is high, what is not, um, what is normal? What are, um, abnormalities of vital signs and my patient's blood pressure is a 200 over a one 50. What's what should be going on with my patient? You don't recognize that's a bad number, right? So same thing. So we're looking at for potential for alteration, potential for complications potential. This is, these are going to be more like your analyze. Um,
okay.
These are going to be your analyzed questions. Um, your higher level class. So like maybe your twos and three level, uh, questions. They want to make sure that you're identifying that there is a potential risk and that there could be a potential complication. You need to be doing something about it now rather than you need to be proactive rather than reactive. So, and this mostly can be your system specific assessments. Uh, you know, like things like, okay, you need to identify, make burns point, what is it, where is it when you're going to see it? I'm also a knowledge of therapeutic procedures, bronchoscopy, bronchoalveolar lodge, those kind of things. This question range is going to be about nine to 15% of the questions.
Yeah.
Then we've got a physiologic adaptation, right? So physiologic adaptation, these are going to be your ICU, acute care cases. They want to make sure that you understand, uh, how to care for a sick patient, should they go south in a hurry. So we're talking about alterations of buddy systems of fluid and electrolyte imbalances, hemodynamics, you know, are gonna get an hartline on a patient. What does it mean? What does their own like do that kind of stuff. Illness management, medical emergencies. And this is where it ties back into that pathophysiology. We need to make sure that we understand, or what if an unexpected response therapies. So let's say you have a patient, here's, here's a, for instance, let's say you have a patient, they're complaining of chest pain. You give them nitro, a tablet, um, sublingually, uh, for, uh, for let's say you give him one tablet, he'd give it once rate, and then you wait five minutes, still complaining of chest pain.
You give them a nature tab. So willingly, you give it a times one. Um, and then what they would say is you've given two doses. Uh, what would be the nurses priority action? Well, you know that you have an order and you know that you can give nitro tabs three times. You can give them Q five minutes times three doses. That's what you can do. That's what we know we can do. So we know the nuts one to need to get metro to have sublingually times one more time and then do something else. We're evaluating our patient. We're constantly doing the nursing process. This is an unexpected response. We would expect that expected responses that even complaining of chest pain because the nature chest pain stuffs. But in that case it doesn't happen. So what that means that we have to do something else. And that's an unexpected response to therapy. Oh, those are the inklings category that we stopped sharing my screen. So we can talk just for a second. Oh one second. Here we go. Cool.
Alright. So those are those categories. And the reason, the reason that you need to know these categories is because it's really important for you to get a better idea of what's to be expected for. The influx is not just about coming in and uh, using test tricky started using memorizing everything and memorizing glass information. Um, I'm a big, big believer of you need to know your Amie before you walk into some sort of battle, right? So if I know if I play basketball and I know that the guy that I'm going to be up against, he plays a tough for the pain and it means I've got to get a little bit more aggressive. That means I got to pay the play smarter if I know that they're going to, if he's going to play off me and he's going to allow me to shoot mid range, if I can keep separation and be able to pull the shot off and I'm good in mid range, then I know that I can do that.
But I don't know that unless I evaluate and study my enemy, quote unquote before. So here at the enclose, this is what we need to do. We need to be able to say, look, we noticed in the collection standard is we note the 95% confidence interval is we know that the 95% confidence interval, it needs to be above the passing standard by the time we finish. And how do we get there? Well, we get the test taking strategies by knowing the content and knowing these categories because these categories help you to identify a weak areas, especially with the same question. You go into the academy and you take the Simclex, then you know that you can be better prepared for the, maybe, maybe you struggle management of care do. This is going to be every every five questions you're going to get them in interim care.
And if you continually to score low in management of care, do we need to continue get those mansion of care questions because they are important. If you cannot, if you cannot demonstrate that you have the capabilities and the ability to uh, safely and effectively manage patient care in management of care, which the huge, huge thing, right? If you are making small errors in the inclax based on things like consents based on things like legal or ethics, um, based on areas of, uh, advocacy, that's a huge problem because that means that you right off the bat aren't going to, that involves such a, a large amount. So you need to make sure that you are uprooted and effective starting out while taking things like this in place. Taking these MPT questions in these categories that you had better understanding of it. So, uh, do you guys have any questions?
Interesting
question about Santa. So the question is, uh, in terms of Zara, if, um, if our set of questions, um, are set of questions, basically an indicator of how well or how poorly you're doing on a test, the answer's no. And because set questions, set of questions. There's like a lot of fly. So if you get to select all that apply, it doesn't mean that you are doing well or doing poor the test. What it means is that you've been given a set of question that you've been, you've based on the previous answers to the questions that you've given, they want to know, um, can you answer this question given this category and given this concept and sometimes it's a select all their points just randomly. There's nothing to do with you can have level of questions. There's three category three levels, level one, level two and level three.
Level one is basically recall from memory. Um, what's an incident? Ocean, what's, what's a narcotic dilaudid. These were recalling these are lower levels. Um, like a lower level saddle with me. Um, you are about to give a pain medication. Which of these three pain or which of these, uh, pain medications or narcotics, that's a lower level, that's all recall. But if you're getting like you can even have a patient patient's presented for heart failure, which of the following answers would you expect to see a heart failure? Patients like the little client, those are level ones that we knew that you've got some time, you've got, depending on what side of the heart, uh, is affected. Sometimes you can have pulmonary congestion. Sometimes you go home, you can have peripheral edema. Sometimes you can have [inaudible]. Sometimes you know, you, there's a whole mess of things that you could have for these patients.
But that's all recall. But when you get to, Hey, I'm anticipating, I'm analyzing, having to interpret those are high level, but just need you to sign a question does not mean that you are moving forward, um, or or previous questions that is an indicator of how well or how difficult that you're doing on the test. Just know that the higher, um, what is kind of true is that the higher level that you get in terms of difficult, if you are getting a bunch of level three questions, the themes that they are, they're still evaluating you at a higher level of analysis, which is the means that you are being challenged more and they don't need to worry about so much about safety and making easy decisions and going to see how you respond to the difficult questions, which is usually a better indicator [inaudible] not an indicator. So armed with that information, that's kind of where you go with satin. So do you guys have any more questions? All right, well, if you guys have no more questions, I'm going to send off for the day. You guys have an awesome weekend. Uh, be sure to check out this video on demand. If you have not had a chance to do it. Aren't you guys having a good weekend and happy nursing?