Platform 2: promoting health and preventing ill health
10 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes.
Platform 2 asks what a nurse does with the opportunity in front of them. Somebody mentions they smoke, or their drinking, or that they have not been to a screening appointment, and the question is what a nurse says next.
What this section asks about
- Health promotion and the principles of behaviour change
- Brief advice and brief intervention, and when a referral is the answer
- UK screening and immunisation programmes
- The wider determinants of health and how inequalities arise
- Communicable disease, notifiable disease and outbreak control
Where the marks go
10 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes. The NMC splits this section across the levels of Bloom's taxonomy:
- Remember and understand: 4
- Apply and analyse: 3
- Evaluate and create: 3
Where candidates lose marks
- Reaching for information giving. Telling somebody the risks rarely changes behaviour on its own.
- Waiting to be asked. The point of an opportunistic intervention is that the nurse raises it.
- Confusing what is notifiable with what is serious. The list is set in law and not everything alarming is on it.
Questions people ask
- Are public health questions really on a nursing exam?
- Yes. Promoting health and preventing ill health is one of the seven platforms in the Future Nurse standards, so Part B draws questions from it in every paper.
- Do I need UK screening ages?
- It helps. Questions about cervical, breast and bowel screening usually turn on the age a programme starts, or on what the nurse should do when somebody has not attended.
Practise this section
Practice is filtered by section, so you can work on this one on its own. Every account gets 10 new questions a day without a card.