HESI Critical Thinking Questions and
Answers 100% Pass
The Patient: A 70-year-old male who is relatively healthy.
The Situation: A liquid medication is prescribed for this patient.
The Question: Prior to administerin
...
HESI Critical Thinking Questions and
Answers 100% Pass
The Patient: A 70-year-old male who is relatively healthy.
The Situation: A liquid medication is prescribed for this patient.
The Question: Prior to administering the prescribed medication, what intervention has the
highest priority? ✔✔Determine if the patient is allergic to the medication
The Patient: A young adult woman has smoked since she was 12 years old.
The Situation: The patient is complaining of "skipped heart beats".
The Question: Which instruction is most important for the nurse to provide this patient? ✔✔Call
for assistance if she feels weak or dizzy when getting out of bed.
The Patient: An older male adult who lives at home alone.
The Situation: The on-call home healthcare nurse is having dinner with family members in a
restaurant when the patients calls on the cell phone.
The Question: What action should the nurse take? ✔✔Leave the table so the nurse can take the
call in a private area.
The Patient: An adult with diabetes mellitus who was just given a morning dose of insulin which
lowers the blood sugar.
The Situation: The Patients breakfast tray arrives, and the nurse notices that the pancake syrup
and sugar pancakes have not been substituted with products containing artificial sweeteners.
The Question: What should the nurse do first in this situation? ✔✔Call the dietary department
and request another tray.
Or
Remove foods containing sugar and offer sugar substitutes.
The Patient: A 55-year-old female with a family history of hypertension.
The Situation: The patient is concerned about her health and states "I have had severe headaches
for the last six months. I think I might have high blood pressure." The nurse determines that the
woman's blood pressure is 138/86 (high normal).
The Question: What action would be best for the nurse to take? ✔✔Ask the patient about the
frequency, timing, and quality of her headaches..
The Patient: A terminally ill male.
The Situation: Nurse "A" and an unidentified woman ride the elevator to the fifth floor. Nurse
"B" joins them on the elevator and exclaims that a code has just been called on a male patient on
the fifth floor, and he is not expected to live.
The Question: What should Nurse "A" do in this situation? ✔✔Tell Nurse "B" to stop discussing
the client's situation in a public place.
The Patient: A 62-year-old female post-surgical patient.
The Situation: When the nurse enters the patient's room she shouts, "No one has done anything
for me! I am going to sue the entire hospital staff, starting with you!"
The Question: What action should the nurse take first? ✔✔Ask the patient what does she need
right now.
The Patient: An elderly female accompanied by her middle-aged son.
The Situation: The patient is being discharged after hip surgery, and the son offers the nurse a
box of candy as a gesture of thanks for caring for his mother.
The Question: What should the nurse do in response to the offer of this gift? ✔✔Tell the son that
the staff was only doing their job and a gift is not necessary.
Or
Thank the son for the gift, and share the candy with all staff members
The Patient: A 36-year-old female.
The Situation: The patient is admitted with a diagnosis of abdominal pain and diarrhea.
The Question: Which action should the nurse take first? ✔✔Administer a prescribed
antidiarrheal medication.
Or
Initiate Intravenous fluids.
The Patients:
1. A 42-year-old with diabetes who is blind and is asking to get up and moved to a chair.
2. An 88-year-old with lower body paralysis who wants to be turned in bed.
3. A 17-year-old with asthma who smokes and has been in the bathroom for 30 minutes.
4. A 55-year-old with cardiac disease who tells the nurse, "Get the TV fixed or I am leaving this
place."
The Situation: The nurse is caring for these four patients.
The Question: Which patient should the nurse see first? ✔✔The 88-year-old with lower body
paralysis who wants to be turned.
Or
The 17-year old with asthma who may be smoking in the bathroom.
The Patient: A 45-year-old female who is 5' 2" tall, weighs 200 pounds, and has smoked since
age 21.
The Situation: The patient comes to the clinic with a complaint of "leg pain."
The Question: It is most important for the nurse to obtain information about which previous
occurrence? ✔✔A previous blood clot in the leg
The Patient: The wife of a wealthy owner of the town's bank.
The Situation: The patient and her husband arrive on the unit. While orienting the patient to the
hospital room, the nurse notices that the patient has placed a large amount of cash and some
expensive earrings in the drawer of the bedside table.
The Question: What is the best action for the nurse to take? ✔✔Advise the patient to have her
husband take the items home when he leaves.
The Patient: An older client living at home who requires weekly dressing changes.
The Situation: While the home health nurse is assessing the patient, the nurse receives a phone
call from a another patient on her cell phone.
The Question: What action should the nurse take? ✔✔Leave the room and take the call
The Patient: A 29-year-old male.
The Situation: A lower leg cast was applied yesterday to a fractured leg. Today the patient tells
the nurse that he is in "terrible pain."
The Question: Which action is most important for the nurse to take? ✔✔Check the patient's toes
for adequate circulation.
The Patient: An older confused male.
The Situation: At 0300 the patient thinks he is in the bathroom and he urinates in his bed. The
bed linens need to be changed, but there are no clean bed sheets available in the unit's linen
closet.
The Question: What action should the nurse take? ✔✔Report the lack of linen to the facility's
patient supply department.
Or
Remove bed linen from an empty room for use on this patient's bed.
The Patient: A frail, older adult who has recently become confused.
The Situation: The nurse is making a home visit and asses the safety features of the home
environment.
The Question: Which suggestion is most important for the nurse to provide the family? ✔✔Keep
a list of emergency phone numbers by the telephone.
Or
Eliminate any throw rugs from floor.
The Patient: A 7-year-old child
The Situation: A nurse arrives with an injection containing preoperative sedation that must be
given to the child now. The child asks the nurse if the shot will hurt.
The Question: What response should the nurse offer to this child? ✔✔"Why don't you count to
ten and then it will be all over"
Or
"Yes, but it won't last very long and soon you will be sleepy"
The Patient: A 19-year-old male who has previously been healthy.
The Situation: The patient companies that he is losing weight despite "eating all the time"
The Question: Considering this patient's age and complaint, which diagnostic test is likely to
provide the most important information? ✔✔A fingerstick for blood sugar level
The Patient: An older adult woman who was admitted this morning from a long-term care
facility with a urinary tract infection.
The Situation: The patient came to the hospital by ambulance wearing a hospital gown and
reports that she is very unhappy because she wants to wear her own clothes. She tells the nurse
that she wants to be discharged immediately.
The Question: What action should the nurse take first? ✔✔Call the long-term care facility and
ask for the patient's clothes to be brought to the hospital.
The Patient: A 35-year-old female with a history of asthma.
The Situation: The patient has been using a steroid inhaler because she is short of breath.
However, she states that her shortness of breath is "no better."
The Question: What is the most important information fo the nurse to obtain? ✔✔Method of
using the inhaler
The Patient: An older adult woman who states that she has a "terrible backache"
The Situation: The nurse inspects the patient's back and determines that there is no obvious
deformity.
The Question: What action should the nurse take next? ✔✔Ask the patient if she has recently
experienced a fall.
The Patient: An elderly confused female in a semi-private room on a hospital medical unit.
The Situation: The patient is yelling loudly at 3:30 a.m. and awakens her roommate, who calls
the nurse for assistance.
The Question: What should the nurse do first in this situation? ✔✔Assess the confused patient
for causes of her behaviour.
The Patient: Male adult discharged from the hospital last week.
The Situation: The patient contacts the nurse via online social media and asks the nurse to meet
for coffee to discuss the physician who provided care during hospitalization.
The Question: What action should the nurse take? ✔✔Explain professional boundaries to the
patient.
The Patient: A 70-year-old man dying of prostate cancer.
The Situation: Nurse "A," who is in charge of a medical unit, notices that a dying patient
continues to moan in pain after receiving intravenous injections of morphine whenever Nurse
"B" is caring for him. Nurse "A" suspects that Nurse "B" may be diluting the patient's dose and
taking the morphine to feed an addiction.
The Question: What should Nurse "A" do in this situation? ✔✔Notify the shift supervisor and
unit director of the circumstances before taking action.
The Patients:
1. A 13-year-old female with a kidney infection who reports that there is "lots of blood" in her
urine.
2. An 18-year-old male with acute alcohol poisoning who is seeing "bugs on the walls"
3. A 21-year-old female with inflammatory bowel disease who has soaked a dressing three hours
after surgery.
4. A 25-year-old male who is sobbing in his room after being told that he has testicular cancer.
The Situation: The nurse is caring for these four patients.
The Question: Who should the nurse see first? ✔✔The 21-year-old who is three hours
postoperative and has a soaked dressing
The Patient: An older adult male who had a seizure this morning.
The Situation: The patient was brought to the emergency department (ED) by his family and is
now awaiting a room assignment on the medical unit. The patient is hallucinating, and loudly
cries out to the nurse, "Get those dogs out of here!"
The Question: What action is best for the nurse to take? ✔✔Encourage the patient to remain
calm until he can be transferred
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