NREMT Practice Test

You are treating an 18-year-old male with asthma. The patient states he is out of his medications and has been wheezing for the last 2 hours. The patient is breathing 38 times per minute, his blood pressure is 136/84, heart rate 118/min, and pulse oximeter reading is 97%. You auscultate breath sounds and hear slight wheezing in the upper lung fields. The patient complains of chest pain and tingling in his arms. He also says that he feels very short of breath.

What would be the next course of action for this patient?

You assess a patient with difficulty breathing who has a history of COPD and is breathing through pursed lips. What is the patient trying to do while breathing through pursed lips?

You have been dispatched to a private residence for a 24-year-old male having a seizure. Upon arrival at the scene, you find the patient lying on the living room floor in a postictal state. As you approach the patient, you note that he is breathing at 14 breaths per minute. The victim’s sister stated that she called 911 after she walked into the house and found her brother lying on the ground seizing.

Your initial approach to this patient should include:

You respond to an unresponsive patient at a local festival. Upon your arrival, bystanders say the patient has been drinking heavily. As you assess the patient, you note a heavy odor of alcohol. The patient is responsive to painful stimuli, has gurgling respirations and vomitus on his face, and breathing deeply at 14 times per minute.

What are the initial airway management priorities for this patient?

What is the most significant advantage of the two-person method of providing positive pressure ventilation via bag-valve-mask?

You respond to the scene of a 37-year-old male patient complaining of acute shortness of breath. He has a history of status asthmaticus when exposed to certain types of chemicals. You discover that he started a new job today as a custodian, and he has been stripping the floors this morning. Upon your arrival, he is sitting in the tripod position in obvious distress. He is slightly cyanotic in his nail beds, his respiratory rate is 34 with poor volume, and he has audible wheezes. His blood pressure is 146/82 mmHg, and his pulse is 102.

What is the most appropriate method for delivering oxygen to this patient?

Hyperventilation results in which of the following?

Cardiac chest pain is usually felt in the jaw and the left arm. This is known as:

A 75-year-old male patient was working in his front yard when he suddenly collapsed. Upon your arrival 7 minutes after collapse, he was found pulseless and apneic on the ground. He has a history of unstable angina.

What is your initial treatment for this patient?

Your 68-year-old male patient complains of a constant, throbbing abdominal pain around his umbilicus with radiation to his back. His posterior tibial and dorsalis pedal pulses are absent. His blood pressure is 168/74 mm Hg in his left arm and 166/72 in his right arm. His radial pulse is 108 beats per minute and strong in his right and left arms. His abdomen is soft and tender around the umbilical area, with no pulsatile mass noted. His medical problems include atherosclerosis and chronic bronchitis.

What condition would you most likely suspect?

You have responded to a nursing home for a 76-year-old female patient who is cyanotic. Her respiratory rate is 26 per minute with adequate tidal volume. Cyanosis and an increase in respiratory rate were noticed approximately five minutes before the nurse requested an ambulance. History reveals deep vein thrombosis and severe Alzheimer s disease.

The patient’s eyes open spontaneously; however, she does not speak. The attending nurse states that her mental status has been unchanged from her normal state. Her lungs are clear and equal bilaterally. Her blood pressure is 142/88 mm Hg with a pulse rate of 86 beats per minute.

Which of the following choices represents the best initial treatment?

You are called to a nursing home for a patient with black, tarry stools. She is conscious but confused. The staff at the nursing home tell you that this mental status is normal for her due to her Alzheimer’s disease. Her skin is warm and dry. Her mucous membranes are dry and ashen.

Her blood pressure is 98/62 mm Hg, and her radial pulse is 114 beats per minute. Her respiratory rate is 16 per minute. Upon assessing your patient, she vomits a substance that looks like coffee grounds.

What condition is this patient most likely suffering from?

You are treating a 49-year-old patient who complains of intense pain between his shoulder blades radiating to his lower back. The pain began 10 minutes before your arrival while he was eating and has been constant. He rates the pain as a 10 out of 10 and describes it as a sharp, tearing pain.

The patient’s blood pressure is 130/76 mm Hg in the right arm and 78/48 mm Hg in the left arm, radial pulse in his right arm is 98 beats per minute and regular, and respiratory rate is 20 per minute and non-labored. He has no significant past medical history.

What condition would you most likely suspect?

Your 59-year-old female patient presents with chest pain and dyspnea. She states that the discomfort has been present for about an hour and started after carrying the laundry upstairs. She describes her pain as dull and rates it at 6/10.

She denies any radiation of the pain and says it gets worse on exertion. Your patient has a blood pressure of 156/90, a heart rate of 108, and a respiratory rate of 20.

What would be your initial diagnostic impression for this patient?

An assault victim you transported earlier in the shift was reported to have bilateral cerebral contusions. You recall that the patient was stuck on the right parietal portion of his head. With this knowledge, you suspect that this injury is __________________, due to both sides of the brain being injured.

You identify a sucking chest wound from a shooting. Treatment includes O2 and rapid transport. What other treatment modality is essential for you to accomplish?

Your trauma patient has a mechanism of injury consistent with a possible spinal injury and has physiologic symptoms of decreased sensation below the belly button. How should the patient be packaged for transport?

What is the position of comfort for a patient with an evisceration?

You are called to a chemical plant for a patient exposed to an unknown substance. Upon arrival, you find a 23-year-old male who had a chemical splash into his right eye. He is unsure what the substance might be; however, there is tearing, redness, and matter forming on the eye’s cornea.

What sort of treatment should you perform?

Upon examining a trauma patient’s nose, which of the following findings would be consistent with a basilar skull fracture?

Your 23-year-old female patient is complaining of generalized lower abdominal pain, described as a 10/10 on a ten scale. Her last normal bowel movement was last night, and her last menstrual period was two months ago.

What is the most likely cause of her abdominal pain?

It is thought that your 72-year-old female patient may have an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Which of the following signs and symptoms support a AAA?

Your fully clothed 25-year-old female patient was just pulled from an icy pond. She is alert, oriented, and barely shivering. What is the next step with this patient?

You assess a scuba diver complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath. The diver states that he was 70 feet below the surface when a large shark appeared in the area. The diver panicked and ascended to the surface very quickly.

Within minutes of getting out of the water, he developed considerable shortness of breath and chest pain that worsened with inhalation. Assessment findings show the patient to have significant respiratory distress accompanied by a rapid pulse rate and severe joint pain. The patient states that he has a history of asthma but did not bring his inhaler with him.

Your immediate action would be to do which of the following?

Which of the following situations could create the greatest dilemma between ethical and moral beliefs?

One of the more stressful calls for first responders is a mass-casualty incident (MCI). In the most basic, simplest definition, what is an MCI?

Where should the triage and treatment sectors be located in a HazMat incident with ten victims?

The injuries a patient would sustain from the secondary effects of an explosion are caused by what?

Several days after treating a chest pain patient, you realize that you made an error on the patient care report. The patient care report has already been submitted to the hospital and your department administration.

What procedure should be followed when attempting to correct your documentation?

Which of the following is the correct sequence for using an AED on an unresponsive, pulseless patient who has been in cardiac arrest for 1-2 minutes?