By the third stage of an ethics arc the course usually stops handing you principles one at a time and hands you a full dilemma instead: a situation where every available action violates something, and the task is to walk a structured decision process from facts to a defensible choice. The written work rewards process discipline over moral confidence, and students who skip steps to reach the answer lose the points the steps carried. Your section may print this as NR 395 or NR395; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
Know what NR-395 Week 3 asks for
A fifteen-year-old at a family practice visit, alone in the room for the confidential portion, asks the nurse not to tell her mother what she is about to say, and then describes something that sits uncomfortably between her privacy and her safety. The nurse has promised nothing yet. Whatever happens next, something of value gets bruised: the girl's trust, the mother's expectations, or a duty the law may impose regardless of anyone's preferences. That is a true dilemma, and it is the shape of problem this stage trains you to write through.
The deliverable at a dilemma stage is usually a case analysis built on a named decision-making framework: identify the problem, gather facts, name the stakeholders, list the options, weigh each against principles and obligations, choose, and describe evaluation. Some sections supply the case; others ask you to bring one. Either way, the structure is the assignment. A grader reading a dilemma paper is checking whether each step actually did work, or whether the student wrote the conclusion first and decorated it with steps afterward. The difference is visible within two paragraphs.
Hold the undergraduate boundary firmly here. A pre-licensure paper about a minor's confidential disclosure is not asked to resolve state law, diagnose the situation, or script a therapy conversation. It is asked to show that a new nurse knows what she does not yet know: when to say that confidentiality has limits before hearing the secret, when the answer is to involve the provider and follow reporting law, and how to keep the adolescent's dignity intact while doing so. Papers that write the nurse as a lone hero solving everything score below papers that use the team the way real practice does.
Work the method, step by step
Six moves for writing a dilemma analysis that shows its work.
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Separate facts from assumptions in two labeled lists
Write down only what the case actually states, then list what you found yourself assuming. Half the analytic errors in dilemma papers are smuggled assumptions, and graders reward students who catch their own.
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Name every stakeholder and what each stands to lose
The patient, the family, the nurse, the provider, the clinic. One clause of stake per person. A dilemma is a map of competing losses, and the map must exist before options make sense.
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Generate at least three real options
Two options produce a false binary. Force a third: a partial disclosure, a delay with safeguards, an escalation with the patient present. The third option is usually where the best answer lives, and rubrics notice its absence.
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Weigh every option against the same criteria
Run each option past the same principles, the same legal duties and the same professional standards, in the same order. Uneven weighing, where your favorite option gets the gentle questions, is the most common analytic flaw at this stage.
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Choose, and say what your choice costs
A dilemma means the winning option still bruises something. Name what your choice sacrifices and how the nurse mitigates it. Papers that present their choice as cost-free announce that the writer never understood the dilemma.
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End with evaluation, not relief
State what would tell you, a week later, that the choice was right or wrong: the patient returned to care, the relationship survived, the report was handled respectfully. Evaluation criteria turn a decision into a process a grader can credit.
Budget the structure and the words
Our frame for a framework-driven dilemma analysis of roughly 850 to 1,050 words. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your section's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree. If your section names a specific decision model, its steps replace these headings in order.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| The dilemma stated | One paragraph proving this is a true dilemma: every option violates something, named explicitly. | 90 to 120 |
| Facts and assumptions | What the case states versus what a reader might assume, kept in separate labeled sentences. | 110 to 140 |
| Stakeholders and stakes | Each party with one clause of what they stand to lose, including the nurse's own professional obligations. | 100 to 130 |
| Options generated | Three or more genuine courses of action, each described neutrally in two or three sentences. | 160 to 200 |
| The weighing | Every option tested against the same principles and duties in the same order, with the tensions shown. | 220 to 270 |
| Choice, cost, evaluation | The selected option, what it sacrifices, the mitigation, and the criteria that would judge it later. | 150 to 190 |
Handle evidence like a professional
Name the decision framework and its source. Structured ethical decision models are published, attributable things. Using one by name, with its origin cited, converts your paper from improvised reasoning into disciplined method, and method is what this stage grades.
Cite duties where duties are claimed. If your analysis states that nurses have obligations around minors' disclosures or mandatory reporting, anchor the claim to a professional standard or a general legal principle and say plainly that specifics vary by state. Precision about the boundary of your knowledge is graduate-grade honesty available at undergraduate price.
Quote the case sparingly and exactly. When a detail from the scenario carries analytic weight, quote its exact words once rather than paraphrasing it three ways. Dilemma analyses drift when the case's facts soften with each retelling.
Keep the emotional register out of the weighing. Words like heartbreaking and devastating belong to the situation, not the analysis. The most persuasive dilemma papers read almost coldly through the middle and let the closing paragraph acknowledge the human weight once.
Avoid the five mistakes that cost points here
- Conclusion-first writing. When step five's winner is visible in step one's framing, the framework was decoration and graders score it that way.
- The false binary. Tell or don't tell erases the middle options where defensible answers usually live.
- Promising confidentiality the nurse cannot keep. Writing the nurse into a promise before the disclosure shows the boundary was never understood.
- Inventing law. Confident claims about what the law requires in an unnamed state are unverifiable and marked as such. State the general duty and flag the variation.
- A cost-free choice. If your selected option harms nothing, you have not analyzed a dilemma; you have avoided one.
Check before you submit
- The opening paragraph proves every option violates something
- Facts and assumptions appear in separately labeled sentences
- At least three genuine options are generated and described neutrally
- Every option is weighed against identical criteria in identical order
- The chosen option's cost and its mitigation are both named
- Evaluation criteria state what would prove the choice right or wrong
Facing a dilemma paper in NR-395?
Send the case and the rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the framework worked honestly step by step, and revisions run until the grade lands.