Nursing

High-yield areas

• Medical-surgical nursing: nursing assessment and management of cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, endocrine and neurological disorders; fluid and electrolyte balance; pre- and post-operative nursing care.
• Vital signs and monitoring: normal ranges for temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure; oxygen delivery devices; ECG basics and recognition of common rhythm disturbances.
• Fundamentals of nursing: the nursing process, patient admission and discharge, positioning, hygiene, comfort needs and documentation.
• Procedures and skills: injection sites and techniques, urinary catheterisation, nasogastric feeding, wound care and dressing, IV therapy and drip rate calculations.
• Infection control: hand hygiene and asepsis, standard and transmission-based precautions, biomedical waste segregation, needle-stick injury management.
• Pharmacology for nurses: routes of drug administration, dosage calculation, the rights of medication administration, and nursing considerations for common drug classes.
• Community health nursing: health education methods and communication, community health worker roles (ASHA, ANM, Anganwadi worker), and the health-care delivery structure from sub-centre to CHC.
• National health programmes: the Universal Immunisation Programme, national programmes for TB, leprosy, vector-borne diseases, NCDs and mental health, and Ayushman Bharat — with the nurse's role in each.
• Obstetric nursing: antenatal assessments, stages of labour and nursing care, the partograph, and postnatal and newborn care including breastfeeding counselling.
• Paediatric nursing: essential newborn care, APGAR scoring, immunisation schedule, growth monitoring, and nursing management of common childhood illnesses.
• Mental health nursing: therapeutic communication, the nurse-patient relationship, defence mechanisms, and care of patients with schizophrenia, depression and mania.
• Nutrition and biochemistry: balanced diet, therapeutic diets, national programmes against anaemia and malnutrition.
• Microbiology: common pathogens, modes of transmission, and hospital-acquired infection prevention.
• Anatomy and physiology: all systems, with emphasis on values and mechanisms that recur in clinical nursing.

How to study for nursing exams

Build a personal master sheet of normal values — vital signs, laboratory ranges, injection volumes, drip rates — and revise it weekly, because numerical one-liners appear in every recruitment paper. Learn procedures as ordered sequences and practise reciting them; examiners test the correct order, not prose. For every disease, study in a fixed template: definition, causes, clinical features, investigations, medical management, nursing management, patient education. Read the nursing process and prioritisation carefully, since "which action first" questions follow ABC and Maslow-style logic. For recruitment exams, solve previous years' question papers timed, and analyse wrong answers rather than re-reading entire textbooks. Pair theory with ward experience: what you have performed — catheterisation, dressing, immunisation — is remembered far longer than what you have only read.

Preparation with PrepElephant

The PrepElephant app supports nursing preparation with question banks, previous-year-question-based practice and revision checklists organised by subject, so you can test yourself on each topic after studying it. Free notes on this website, including topic pages across fundamentals, medical-surgical, community, obstetric and psychiatric nursing, follow a direct-answer format that mirrors a good viva response. Clinical skills themselves must be learned and practised in your college laboratory and clinical postings — an app can sharpen your recall, not replace hands-on training.