10 free AEMT practice questions: Head, Spinal, and Chest Trauma

Hold ventilation until a paramedic arrives to decompress the chest: Waiting means leaving a patient at 85% and 8 breaths a minute with no ventilation at all. Hypoxia is the faster killer here, and the needle is Paramedic level anyway, so holding still gains this patient nothing while the intercept is on its way.

Ventilate hard and fast to push past the rising airway resistance: Hard and fast is the one thing that makes this worse. Higher pressures and a higher rate force more air into a pleural space that has no way to empty, which speeds up the mediastinal shift already showing in the distended neck veins.

Stop ventilating and place the patient on a non-rebreather mask: A non-rebreather mask delivers oxygen to a patient who is moving air. At 8 shallow breaths a minute this patient is not, so the oxygen never reaches the alveoli in useful amounts no matter what concentration sits on the face.

Take over ventilations with a bag valve mask before anything else: Ventilation matters and it is coming. This heart stopped from a blow that threw it into a rhythm only a shock will fix, and the defibrillator is the one thing on the truck that treats the cause.

Give a fluid bolus through an intraosseous line in the tibia: Fluid does not treat ventricular fibrillation. Access is worth having once the rhythm has been addressed, and it never comes before the shock in a witnessed arrest with a machine already on scene.

Hold care at this level and wait for the paramedic intercept: Nothing here needs a paramedic. Compressions and defibrillation with an automated external defibrillator are the treatment, both fully within your scope, and delay is the only thing that lowers this patient's odds.

Tension pneumothorax from the crushing force on the chest: A tension makes one lung silent and drops the pressure, and it does not turn the face and neck a different color from the torso. Nothing here describes air trapped in the pleural space.

Cardiac tamponade from blunt force against the sternum: Tamponade distends the neck veins too, which is why it is worth considering. It does not produce a cyanotic head and neck above a normal colored torso, and it comes with muffled heart sounds and a narrowing pulse pressure instead.

Massive hemothorax from the ribs tearing the lung tissue: A hemothorax bleeds into the chest, so the neck veins go flat rather than distended and the patient shows the pale, cool skin of blood loss. That is the opposite of the coloring in front of you.

A single number taken at the time of the radio report: One number at the moment of the radio call is a snapshot, and a snapshot cannot tell the hospital which direction this patient is heading. The same value can mean steady or crashing.

The worst single value seen at any point on the call: The worst value alone tells the hospital where the patient bottomed out and nothing about whether the patient is still falling. A worsening trend and a single bad moment call for different preparations.

An estimate of how the patient will look on arrival: Predicting what the patient will look like on arrival is guesswork, and it swaps findings you actually measured for a number nobody took. Report what you saw and when you saw it.

Pack the ear canal with sterile gauze to stop the drainage: Packing the ear traps pressure that has nowhere else to go, which is the one thing this patient cannot afford. The drainage is a symptom of the fracture rather than a bleed you need to control.

Irrigate the ear canal with sterile saline and then cover it: Irrigating pushes fluid and anything sitting in the canal inward, toward a skull that is already open. Nothing about a leaking ear canal calls for flushing it in the field.

Suction the ear canal gently and save the fluid for the hospital: Suctioning a draining ear canal applies negative pressure directly against a fractured skull base and risks pulling contamination inward. Collecting the fluid changes nothing about the care this child gets.

Release the patient, since the exam and vital signs are normal: A normal exam during a lucid interval is exactly what a lucid interval looks like. Releasing this patient on the strength of it is how an arterial bleed gets discovered at home an hour later.

Release the patient with instructions to call if symptoms start: Handing the monitoring to a patient who may lose consciousness without warning puts the catch in the wrong hands. A loss of consciousness after a temple strike earns a transport with someone watching.

Transport, and stop the neurologic checks now that they are normal: Stopping the checks because they are normal gives up the only tool you have for catching a change. Normal now is the finding that later checks get compared against.

Remove it now, so a cervical collar can be sized and applied: A collar is not the goal, a neutral and stable head is. A snug helmet is already doing that job, and pulling it off to make room for a collar trades a stable head for a movement you did not need.

Remove it now, since every helmet comes off before transport: No rule says every helmet comes off. The decision turns on fit, airway access, and whether the helmet interferes with your assessment, and this one passes all three.

Leave it on, but only until the patient is moved to the stretcher: Taking the helmet off at the stretcher adds a movement at exactly the moment you are already moving the patient. A helmet that fits snugly over a reachable airway stays on through the call.

The mechanism alone, since any collision can injure a spine: Mechanism alone is the exact trap the rule is written against. Every collision would qualify, and the collar would go on every patient no matter what the exam showed.

The patient's age alone, since older spines fracture easily: Age changes how fragile a spine is and it belongs in your thinking, and it does not replace the exam. An older patient with a clean exam and a clean history still has a clean exam.

The speed of the collision reported by the other driver: A number reported by the other driver is not a finding on this patient, and it would not change what you found. The rule asks for findings on the patient in front of you.

Continue slowly until the head reaches a neutral position: Continuing slowly is still continuing. Pain and resistance are the signal to stop, and easing gently past a stop signal is how a bone fragment finds the cord.

Reverse the movement and turn the head back further still: Turning the head further away from neutral adds movement in the other direction, which carries the same risk you were trying to avoid. The instruction is to stop, not to reverse.

Apply steady traction along the neck to ease it past this: Traction is not a way past resistance in a neck. Pulling along an injured cervical spine can distract an unstable segment, and it is not part of restricting spinal motion.

Withhold fluid, warm the patient, and wait for the pressure to rise: Withholding fluid and waiting gives up on the volume side of the problem, and the volume side is the one you are not allowed to assume away. A cord injured patient can be bleeding with no pain to tell you so.

Give fluid until the pressure is normal, then stop the warming: Chasing a normal number with fluid overshoots what titrating to perfusion means, and stopping the warming is backward. These patients cannot vasoconstrict or shiver, so they lose heat fast, and cold makes bleeding worse.

Begin a vasopressor infusion titrated to the blood pressure: Vasopressors run as medicated infusions, and maintaining a medicated infusion is Paramedic level under the national scope model. Requesting the intercept is how this patient gets that drug, and it counts as correct care rather than a gap in it.