Prioritization questions look like knowledge questions and are not — all four options are usually correct nursing actions, and the question is only sequence. Build the order, then find out which rule decided it. Students lose more marks here than on any other single skill.
Pick a scenario
Your order — 1 is first
Click to place the next one
The verdict
Place all four, then press Check my order.
The frameworks, in the order you apply them
ABC — airway, then breathing, then circulation. An obstructed airway means minutes.
C-A-B is the deliberate exception: pulseless and unresponsive means compressions first. Exsanguinating external hemorrhage in trauma also precedes airway.
Maslow — physiological (oxygen, fluid, nutrition, elimination, sleep, pain relief) before safety, before love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.
Then the discriminators: acute over chronic, unstable over stable, actual over potential, unexpected over expected.
When two patients are equally unstable, survival potential — treat the one intervention is most likely to save.
The patient you see first is almost always the one whose findings represent a change from their own baseline, not the one with the single most abnormal number.