How I studied for my 20-minute head-to-toe final
For part of our final in my Fundamentals of Nursing course, we had to perform a complete head-to-toe physical on our partner in under 20 minutes. Everything had to be memorized- just walk into the room and start the assessment! I began studying really in depth about 4 weeks before the test out date.
Everyone in the class studied for this test differently but I did it by: first- making a head to toe script, second- making giant head to toe flash cards, and third- condensing my large flash cards into small simple flash cards, which I then carried around constantly memorizing them.
Although I learned a lot about assessment in this class, I do feel like the head-to-toe test out was more memorization than actually assessing our partner. For example, when demonstrating how to listen to the lungs we didn’t even have to actually use our stethoscope- only pretend.
I ended up passing my test out in about 15 minutes- and here’s how!
First:
I filled out a total script of everything I needed to do and say. This ensured that everything was down on one sheet so I didn’t have 100 things to remember and have constant thoughts of “don’t forget to say ____!”
I color coded it so that what I say is in blue and actions I need to psychically perform are in orange. This helped simply the concept of “say this vs. do this” because some things we simply needed to vocalize not actually do.
Second:
Then I created some jumbo “flash cards” out of 8x12 paper that I just folded in half.
Since we had to walk into the room and simply know exactly what to say I knew I needed to start memorizing the steps of each assessment for each body system. I would flash through these cards and quiz myself, looking at the system and challenging myself to know all of the steps.
These are somewhat color coded as well. There’s steps and the sub steps, and then notes on those sub steps.
I but a box around the “normal values” because that is what my partner would most likely have, and therefor those are the things I would be stating aloud.
Third:
Finally the thing that helped me the most was simplifying those large cards into regular flash cards. Again I stuck with only putting the system to be assessed on the front, and put everything that needed to be said/done on the back.
Like I said I felt that this test out was mostly memorization, so these flash cards helped a TON!
