Physical Care Skills
Physical care skills are the hands-on tasks that keep a resident clean, safe, nourished, mobile, and eliminating normally: bathing and perineal care, oral and denture care, dressing and grooming, bed making, positioning and turning, transferring with a gait belt, range-of-motion exercises, feeding and fluid intake, intake-and-output measurement, routine specimen collection, and vital signs. Infection control runs through all of it - hand hygiene before and after every resident contact, gloves for contact with body fluids, and working from cleanest to dirtiest during care.
What the questions target
Most missed items here are scope-of-practice items. A nurse aide may give a bed bath, apply a non-sterile dressing to intact skin, collect a routine urine or stool specimen, and assist with a urinal. A nurse aide may not insert a catheter or feeding tube, perform sterile dressing changes or irrigations, give any medication (pills, drops, creams, or suppositories), or do anything that breaks the skin or enters a body opening. Other items test sequence and direction: perineal care always goes front to back, washing moves from clean area to dirty, and a resident is turned and repositioned at least every two hours. Watch for the reddened-area distractor - never massage a reddened or blanched area; keep pressure off it and report it.
Rule of thumb
If a task breaks the skin, enters a body opening, or involves a medication, it is not yours - decline politely and tell the nurse.
Worked example
You need a respiratory rate. Keep your fingers on the resident's wrist as though still counting the pulse, watch the chest rise, and count for a full minute (one rise = one breath), noting depth, rhythm, and effort. A normal adult resting rate is 12–20 per minute. Saying "28, shallow, using neck muscles" is far more useful than "breathing looks fast."