How to Answer NCLEX Prioritization Questions: “Who Do You See First?”

Prioritization questions ask you to choose the client, action or assessment that comes first. Every option may be correct nursing care — your job is to pick the most urgent. A few dependable frameworks make these questions far more manageable.

Start with the ABCs

Airway, Breathing and Circulation threats almost always come first. A client with stridor or a falling oxygen saturation outranks a client with pain or anxiety.

Use Maslow’s hierarchy

Physiological needs come before safety, and safety comes before psychosocial needs like love, belonging and self-esteem — unless the psychosocial issue is a safety risk, such as a client expressing suicidal intent.

More rules of thumb

• Acute beats chronic: a new change matters more than a long-standing, expected finding.
• Unstable beats stable: unexpected findings outrank expected ones for the client’s condition.
• Actual beats potential: a problem happening now beats a risk that might happen.
• Assess before you act, unless the situation is an emergency that needs immediate intervention.

Practice is what makes these frameworks automatic. Work through prioritization questions in NCLEX Achiever and read every rationale to see which rule each question is testing.