Important: Complete this assessment first and complete all other assessments in the order they are presented.

In this assessment, you will lay the foundation for the work that will carry through your capstone experience and guide the practice hours to complete the work in this course. The purpose of this assessment is to allow you to define a patient, family, or population health problem that is relevant to your personal practice and to begin building a body of evidence that will inform your approach to your practice hours, the intervention you design, and the professional product you will deliver.

Demonstration of Proficiency

By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:

• Competency 1: Lead people and processes to improve patient, systems, and population outcomes. 
  • Define a patient, family, or population health problem that is relevant to personal practice.
• Competency 2: Make clinical and operational decisions based upon the best available evidence. 
  • Analyze evidence from the literature and professional sources to support decisions related to defining and guiding nursing actions related to a health problem.
• Competency 7: Implement patient-centered care to improve quality of care and the patient experience. 
  • Propose strategies to improve patient or population outcomes related to a health problem.
• Competency 8: Integrate professional standards and values into practice. 
  • Reflect on state board nursing practice standards relevant to a selected health problem.
  • Communicate professionally with clear, logically organized writing, using correct grammar, spelling, and APA style.

Important: Complete this assessment first and complete all other assessments in the order they are presented.

Professional Context

Nurses are leaders in problem identification and solution, planning and implementing patient care strategies to address problems in the home, hospital, and community. This assessment will help you develop a problem statement for a patient, family, or population health concern.

Instructions

Throughout this capstone course, you will be investigating a patient, family, or population health problem relevant to your practice. For this assessment, you will identify the problem that you will address throughout your clinical practicum in this course, as well as begin to establish your evidence and research base to plan, implement, and share findings related to your project. The Problem Identification Template [DOC] will guide you through development of a problem statement, evidence collection and analysis, and best practices to help you create your implementation plan for the second assessment in this course.

Your submission for this assessment will be the completed template. When working through the template, you may use the resources provided in this course; however, most of your research and search for evidence will be conducted by you. Use the Capella University Library, professional organization and government resources, and relevant organizational best practices as sources of evidence. This is the capstone course for your BSN degree; your goal is to demonstrate your achievement of the program outcomes through your work on this project.

The following are some health issues that would be appropriate for your project:

• Diabetes self-management.
• Hypertension management and prevention.
• Medication reconciliation within a family or group.
• Parkinson’s disease support group.
• Patient family education communication improvements.
• Postoperative home care.

This list is by no means exhaustive. You should choose a patient, family, or population health issue that is relevant to your practice and organization; you must be able to study the problem in your clinical practicum effectively.

Your submission will be assessed based on the following criteria:

• Define a patient, family, or population health problem and realistic goals relevant to personal practice.
• Analyze evidence from the literature and professional sources to define and guide nursing actions related to a health problem.
• Propose strategies to improve patient or population outcomes related to a health problem.
• Reflect on state board nursing practice standards relevant to an identified health problem.
• Communicate professionally, with writing that is clear, logically organized, and uses correct grammar, spelling, and APA style.

CORE ELMS

Completion of this course requires a face-to-face clinical practicum. You are required to log your time in the CORE ELMS system just as you have for past courses with direct interaction. The CORE ELMS link is located in the left-hand navigation pane.

Additional Requirements

• Length of submission: Use the provided template. Most submissions will be 2 to 4 pages. You do not need to include a title page. Be sure to complete the reference page at the end of the template.
• Number of references: Cite a minimum of 5 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that support your central ideas. Resources should be no more than five years old.
• APA formatting: Make sure that in-text citations and reference list follow current APA style.

Portfolio Prompt: Remember to save the assessment to your ePortfolio. After you complete your program you may want to consider leveraging your Portfolio as part of a job search or other demonstration of your academic competencies.

Quality, cost, and access are three pillars of the U.S. health system. Select three other attributes of our system and relate them to these three pillars. You may use the attributes provided by Shi and Singh for your selection options.

• For this discussion, you must refer to at least one article from a reputable newspaper (can be online) or other media source that is current (from the last month) and post the resource in APA format.
• You must have at least two references in your initial post and the media source can be one of the two.
• Summarize your post in 500 to 750 words.