The SNLE blueprint: four sections and their official weights

The four sections

• Adult Nursing — 40%: medical nursing, surgical nursing, critical care nursing, community nursing, and mental/psychiatric nursing.
• Maternal-Child Nursing — 30%: maternity nursing, gynecology, neonatal nursing, paediatric medical and paediatric surgical.
• Nursing Fundamentals — 20%: fundamentals of nursing, professionalism, patient-centred care, evidence-based practice and research, leadership and management, quality and safety management, health education and promotion, communication and information technology, physical assessment, pharmacology, and basic sciences.
• Nursing Management and Leadership — 10%: resources to support and coordinate patient care, quality and safe patient care at the frontline, nursing teams and interprofessional relations, nursing informatics for the safe and legal delivery of care, and research and evidence-based practice.

The guide states its own tolerance: the distribution may differ by up to ±5% in each level. Adult nursing can appear anywhere between 35% and 45%, and management and leadership will never fall below 5%. That is a planning margin, not permission to skip a section.

What the weights mean for your week

The most useful thing to do with a blueprint is spend your week by it. With ten study hours, the honest split is four hours on adult nursing, three on maternal-child, two on fundamentals and one on management and leadership.

In questions: 200 items at those weights is roughly 80 on adult nursing, 60 on maternal-child, 40 on fundamentals and 20 on management and leadership.

The section that falls out of most preparation

Nursing management and leadership is the section most material hurries past, because it is not a clinical specialty with an obvious question bank. Study it as its own subject:

• Delegation: what may be delegated, to whom, and what never may.
• Prioritising between several patients at once.
• Incident reporting, quality improvement, and patient safety at the frontline.
• Working with other teams and other health professions.
• Nursing informatics and the confidentiality of the electronic health record.

One nursing-management textbook will do more for this section than another hundred clinical questions. And plainly: this section is not covered in our own bank as it should be, and we are working on it. Saying so is more use to you than a claim of coverage that is not there.

How it differs from the medical blueprint

If you are comparing notes with a colleague preparing for the SMLE: the nursing blueprint gives a percentage per section, while the medical one gives an item count per topic and no percentage per area. The two documents work differently, and preparation habits do not transfer between them unexamined. See the SMLE blueprint.

Where this comes from

Every figure on this page is transcribed from the Saudi Nursing Licensure Examination (SNLE) Examination Content Guideline, published by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, in the edition on the Commission’s website, read on 31 August 2026.

SCFHS revises these guides from time to time. Before you apply, open the current guide on the Commission’s site and check for yourself: the official PDF. Any page on the internet, this one included, can lag behind the official document, and this is not a substitute for it.

SQB is an independent educational platform, not affiliated with the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties or with Prometric.