Free OET mock test — all four sub-tests, AI-scored Writing and Speaking 🇦🇺

8 original practice questions written by Myndaq in the OET (Nursing & Medicine) style. They are not taken from this mock paper or from official past papers. Try each one, then open the answer.

1. Question 1Reading Part AOne correct answer

   Topic: Preventing pressure injuries on an acute medical ward

   Text A - Risk assessment Every adult admitted to the ward needs a pressure injury risk score recorded within six hours of arrival, using the ward's approved scoring tool. Repeat the scoring whenever the patient's condition changes, after any procedure that kept the patient immobile for more than two hours, and at least once a week for anyone staying longer than seven days. Enter the score, the date and your name in the electronic care plan.

   Text B - Checking the skin Look closely at the skin over the sacrum, hips, heels, elbows and the back of the head at each shift. In patients with darker skin tones, redness may be hard to see, so compare the area with nearby skin for warmth, firmness or a change in colour. Press lightly on any reddened patch: if the colour does not fade under your finger, treat the area as already damaged and tell the nurse in charge.

   Text C - Changing position Patients at high risk who cannot move without help should be assisted to change position at least every four hours, or more often if their care plan says so. A 30-degree side tilt reduces pressure on the sacrum. When a patient comes back from theatre, check first that both heels are lifted clear of the mattress with a pillow placed under the calves.

   Text D - Getting specialist help Contact the tissue viability team within 24 hours if you find a wound that extends through the full depth of the skin, a wound whose depth cannot be judged, or a deep purple area that suggests damage beneath intact skin. Any injury that develops after admission must also be logged in the incident reporting system before the end of your shift.

   A patient has just come back to the ward after a three-hour operation. Which text tells you whether his pressure injury risk score needs to be recalculated?

   1. A. Text A
   2. B. Text B
   3. C. Text C
   4. D. Text D
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A

   Text A lists the situations in which the score must be repeated, including 'after any procedure that kept the patient immobile for more than two hours'. A three-hour operation meets that condition, so Text A answers the question.

   Text C is the tempting distractor because it mentions patients returning from theatre, but it only tells you to check that the heels are offloaded; it says nothing about rescoring. Text B covers skin inspection and Text D covers referral and incident reporting, so neither deals with repeating the risk score.

2. Question 2Reading Part AType a numeric answer

   Topic: Preventing pressure injuries on an acute medical ward

   Text A - Risk assessment Every adult admitted to the ward needs a pressure injury risk score recorded within six hours of arrival, using the ward's approved scoring tool. Repeat the scoring whenever the patient's condition changes, after any procedure that kept the patient immobile for more than two hours, and at least once a week for anyone staying longer than seven days. Enter the score, the date and your name in the electronic care plan.

   Text B - Checking the skin Look closely at the skin over the sacrum, hips, heels, elbows and the back of the head at each shift. In patients with darker skin tones, redness may be hard to see, so compare the area with nearby skin for warmth, firmness or a change in colour. Press lightly on any reddened patch: if the colour does not fade under your finger, treat the area as already damaged and tell the nurse in charge.

   Text C - Changing position Patients at high risk who cannot move without help should be assisted to change position at least every four hours, or more often if their care plan says so. A 30-degree side tilt reduces pressure on the sacrum. When a patient comes back from theatre, check first that both heels are lifted clear of the mattress with a pillow placed under the calves.

   Text D - Getting specialist help Contact the tissue viability team within 24 hours if you find a wound that extends through the full depth of the skin, a wound whose depth cannot be judged, or a deep purple area that suggests damage beneath intact skin. Any injury that develops after admission must also be logged in the incident reporting system before the end of your shift.

   Unless the care plan states otherwise, what is the longest time, in hours, that a high-risk patient who cannot move without help should be left before being assisted to change position?

   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: 4

   Text C states that high-risk patients who cannot move without help 'should be assisted to change position at least every four hours, or more often if their care plan says so'. The maximum interval is therefore 4 hours.

   The other numbers in the texts answer different questions: 6 hours is the deadline for the first risk score (Text A), 2 hours is the length of immobility that triggers rescoring (Text A), and 24 hours is the time limit for contacting the tissue viability team (Text D).

3. Question 3Reading Part BOne correct answer

   Email to all ward nursing staff

   Subject: Patients' own medicines - change to current practice

   From next Monday, medicines that patients bring with them on admission should no longer be handed back to relatives as a matter of routine. Once the admitting nurse has checked the labels against the patient's details, the medicines are to be kept in the patient's locked bedside cabinet and used during the stay, provided the ward pharmacist confirms they are suitable. Items the pharmacist rejects, for example because they are past their expiry date, have no label or have been stopped by the medical team, must not be disposed of on the ward as happened previously. Place them in a sealed bag marked with the patient's name and send them to the pharmacy department.

   What does the email say should happen to a patient's own medicine that is out of date?

   1. A. It should be given to the patient's relatives to take home.
   2. B. It should be sent to the pharmacy department in a labelled bag.
   3. C. It should be destroyed on the ward once a pharmacist has checked it.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The email says that items the pharmacist rejects, including those 'past their expiry date', must be placed 'in a sealed bag marked with the patient's name' and sent to the pharmacy department. Option B restates this.

   Option A describes the routine practice that the email is ending. Option C is wrong because the email says rejected medicines 'must not be disposed of on the ward as happened previously'; destroying them on the ward was the old practice, not the new one.

4. Question 4Reading Part BOne correct answer

   Extract from an infection prevention guideline

   Use of non-sterile gloves

   Gloves reduce contamination of the hands but do not replace hand hygiene. Clean your hands before putting gloves on and immediately after taking them off. Gloves are not required for routine contact with a patient's intact skin, such as when recording blood pressure or helping someone to sit up, unless the patient is on contact precautions. When caring for one patient, remove your gloves, clean your hands and put on a new pair if you move from a contaminated body site, such as a wound or a catheter bag, to a clean one. Never wash or apply alcohol rub to gloved hands in order to reuse the same gloves.

   According to the extract, gloves should be

   1. A. worn whenever a nurse touches a patient's skin.
   2. B. changed during the care of one patient in some circumstances.
   3. C. cleaned with alcohol rub before moving to another task.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The guideline says that, while caring for one patient, staff should remove their gloves, clean their hands and use a new pair when moving 'from a contaminated body site ... to a clean one'. So gloves must sometimes be changed within the care of a single patient, which is option B.

   Option A contradicts the statement that gloves are not needed for routine contact with intact skin unless contact precautions apply. Option C contradicts the final sentence, which forbids applying alcohol rub to gloved hands to reuse the same gloves.

5. Question 5Reading Part BOne correct answer

   Notice on the staff intranet

   Reporting near misses

   A near miss is any event that could have harmed a patient but was noticed and stopped in time, such as a wrong dose picked up at the bedside check. Please record near misses in the same online system used for incidents. You are welcome to talk the event through with your line manager, but their approval is not needed before you submit a report. Reports are reviewed each week by the patient safety team, who look for patterns across departments. Information in a report will not be used to take disciplinary action against the person who submitted it, except where there is evidence that harm was caused deliberately.

   The notice explains that a near-miss report

   1. A. must be agreed with a line manager before it is sent.
   2. B. is unlikely to lead to action being taken against the reporter.
   3. C. is only needed when a patient has actually been harmed.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The notice states that report information 'will not be used to take disciplinary action against the person who submitted it', with one exception for deliberate harm. Option B captures this reassurance.

   Option A is wrong because staff may discuss the event with a manager but 'their approval is not needed'. Option C is wrong because a near miss is defined as an event that was stopped before it could harm the patient, so no actual harm is required for a report.

6. Question 6Reading Part COne correct answer

   For much of the past twenty years, adding a medicine has been the reflex response to a new symptom in an older person. Viewed one prescription at a time, the reasoning looks sound: each drug targets a measurable problem and is usually backed by trial data. Yet those trials seldom recruited people in their late eighties living with five or six long-term conditions, and the benefits they reported tended to build up over periods that some of these patients will not live to see. Deprescribing, meaning the planned and monitored withdrawal of drugs whose risks have come to exceed their value, is still sometimes described as a way of saving money or, less kindly, as a form of giving up. Both descriptions miss the point. Stopping a medicine safely calls for as much skill as starting one: the clinician must know which drugs need to be reduced gradually, which symptoms may come back, and how much the patient values a modest gain in lifespan compared with tablets that leave them unsteady every morning.

   What point does the writer make about the clinical trials referred to in the paragraph?

   1. A. Prescribers have tended to misreport their results.
   2. B. Their findings may not apply well to many very elderly patients.
   3. C. They showed that the benefits of treatment appear quickly.
   4. D. They underestimated the harm of combining several medicines.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The writer notes that the trials 'seldom recruited people in their late eighties living with five or six long-term conditions' and that their benefits appeared over long periods some patients will not live to see. The implication is that the evidence does not transfer well to very old, multimorbid patients, so B is correct.

   A is not mentioned: the writer questions how the evidence applies, not how it was reported. C is the opposite of the text, which says benefits 'tended to build up over periods' of time. D is tempting because the paragraph is about multiple medicines, but the writer never claims the trials measured or underestimated interaction harms.

7. Question 7Reading Part COne correct answer

   When structured handover tools first arrived on hospital wards, their attraction was their simplicity. A fixed order of headings, supporters argued, would stop key details from being lost between one shift and the next. Early audits seemed to bear this out, recording fewer omissions of basic facts such as allergies and resuscitation decisions. More recent observational research presents a less tidy picture. In several studies, nurses described filling in every heading on the form while leaving out the one concern that was genuinely troubling them: a patient who simply 'did not look right'. The template, in other words, had become a destination rather than a starting point. None of this is an argument for abandoning structure altogether. What it suggests is that the tool performs best when senior staff present it as a prompt for conversation, openly encouraging the nurse coming on duty to ask what is worrying the colleague who is about to leave.

   What does the phrase 'a destination rather than a starting point' suggest about the handover template?

   1. A. Staff treated completing it as the aim in itself.
   2. B. It was being filled in too late in the shift to help.
   3. C. It sent nurses to the wrong sources of information.
   4. D. It contained too many headings to finish in the time available.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A

   The sentence before the phrase describes nurses completing every heading yet omitting their real worry. Calling the template 'a destination' means that finishing the form had become the goal, rather than a basis ('a starting point') for further discussion. That is option A.

   B misreads 'destination' as a point in time; the paragraph says nothing about when the form was completed. C and D introduce ideas (wrong information sources, excessive length) that the writer never raises.

8. Question 8Reading Part COne correct answer

   When structured handover tools first arrived on hospital wards, their attraction was their simplicity. A fixed order of headings, supporters argued, would stop key details from being lost between one shift and the next. Early audits seemed to bear this out, recording fewer omissions of basic facts such as allergies and resuscitation decisions. More recent observational research presents a less tidy picture. In several studies, nurses described filling in every heading on the form while leaving out the one concern that was genuinely troubling them: a patient who simply 'did not look right'. The template, in other words, had become a destination rather than a starting point. None of this is an argument for abandoning structure altogether. What it suggests is that the tool performs best when senior staff present it as a prompt for conversation, openly encouraging the nurse coming on duty to ask what is worrying the colleague who is about to leave.

   What is the writer's overall view of structured handover tools?

   1. A. They should gradually be replaced by informal discussion.
   2. B. Their early benefits were exaggerated by poorly designed audits.
   3. C. They remain useful when they are used to support conversation.
   4. D. They are mainly valuable for recording allergies and resuscitation decisions.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: C

   The writer states that the research is 'not an argument for abandoning structure altogether' and concludes that the tool 'performs best' when it is presented as 'a prompt for conversation'. This balanced, supportive view matches option C.

   A contradicts the refusal to abandon structure. B is tempting because the writer says early audits only 'seemed' to confirm the benefit, but the design of those audits is never criticised. D picks out a detail from the early audits and turns it into the writer's main conclusion, which it is not.