Late in an ethics arc the course usually asks for its most demanding written form: a position argument on a live ethical issue in today's healthcare environment, one where reasonable professionals disagree and your job is to take a side with evidence, meet the strongest objection honestly, and stay inside a nurse's scope while doing it. Cost and access pressures, consent complexities and resource allocation are the common territories. 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 7 asks for
Consider a family practice nurse who discovers, during a routine refill call, that a mother has been stretching her eight-year-old's asthma controller inhaler to every other day since the family's insurance changed and the copay tripled. The child's night cough is back. Nothing about this scene is exotic; versions of it happen in clinics every week, and it drops a working nurse into the middle of one of the era's genuine ethical arguments: what care owes a patient when cost stands between a child and a prescribed therapy, and what a nurse's advocacy obligation requires when the barrier is a benefit design rather than a biology. A position week asks you to pick an issue of that kind and argue it properly.
The deliverable is typically a position paper or structured post: state a contestable claim about an ethical issue in the current healthcare environment, support it with published evidence and principle, present the strongest opposing view accurately, and rebut it. Every clause in that sequence is usually a scoring row. Students most often lose the opposition rows, because writing the other side fairly feels like weakening your own case. It is the opposite: a rubric that asks for counterargument is testing whether you can be trusted to reason in a profession where the other side of most hard questions is staffed by thoughtful people.
Scope discipline matters more here than anywhere else in the course. A pre-licensure paper on cost barriers does not redesign insurance markets, and a paper on consent does not settle law. Your claim should live where a nurse lives: what the profession should hold, what advocacy requires, what a nurse owes the family in the exam room and the system around it. Position papers that argue at policy altitude with bedside evidence, or at bedside altitude with policy slogans, both misfire; the strong ones pick the nurse's altitude and hold it for every paragraph.
Work the method, step by step
Six moves for building a position that survives a grader's pushback.
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Write a claim someone informed could deny
Nurses should advocate for patients is not arguable; no one denies it. Nurses have an affirmative duty to raise cost barriers with prescribers even when families do not ask is arguable, bounded and gradeable. Test your thesis by writing its denial in one sentence; if the denial sounds unreasonable, sharpen the claim.
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Ground the issue in one concrete case
Open with a de-identified or hypothetical scene that makes the issue unavoidable, then let every abstract paragraph answer back to it. The case is not decoration; it is the test each argument must pass to stay honest.
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Build the affirmative on principle plus evidence
Pair each reason with both layers: the ethical principle it rests on, named precisely, and a published source showing the stakes are real. Reasons carried by principle alone float; reasons carried by data alone lack the normative force a position paper needs.
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Write the opposition as its best advocate would
Give the opposing view its strongest form, with its own principle and its own evidence, in prose you would sign. A strawman opposition forfeits the row it was written for, and graders in argument weeks read the counterposition paragraph first.
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Rebut the argument, not the people
Your rebuttal should say why the opposing consideration, though real, weighs less here: a boundary it misses, a consequence it underprices, a principle it subordinates that should govern. Conceding what the other side gets right is not weakness; it is the signature of an argument in control of itself.
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Land on what a nurse should do differently
Close at the nurse's altitude: the practice behavior, advocacy step or professional stance your position requires. An argument that ends in the exam room, with conduct, finishes the work a nursing ethics course actually assigns.
Budget the structure and the words
Our frame for a position argument of roughly 850 to 1,050 words, a common footprint for the heaviest written work in a one-credit course. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your section's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree. Scale proportionally if your assigned length differs.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| The case that forces the question | One scene making the issue concrete, told without tipping your conclusion in the telling. | 100 to 130 |
| The claim | Your contestable thesis in one or two sentences, bounded to the nurse's altitude. | 50 to 70 |
| First reason | Principle named, evidence attached, and the reason applied back to the opening case. | 150 to 180 |
| Second reason | A distinct line of support, not a restatement, with its own principle and source. | 150 to 180 |
| The opposition, at strength | The best opposing argument with its principle and evidence, written fairly. | 140 to 170 |
| Rebuttal and close | Why your claim still holds, what it concedes, and the practice conduct it requires of a nurse. | 160 to 200 |
Handle evidence like a professional
Match each kind of claim to its kind of source. Claims about what happens, medication nonadherence when costs rise, delayed care after coverage loss, need data sources. Claims about what nurses owe need normative sources: the profession's code, position statements, published ethics literature. A position paper runs on both rails, and mixing them up is the most common structural fault.
Report cost and access figures with their population and year. Write that a named survey in a stated year found a specific share of families skipping doses over cost, rather than announcing that many families ration medicine. In an argument, the precision of your evidence is read as the precision of your thinking.
Cite the opposition's sources, not just your own. The counterposition paragraph earns full credit when it carries its own citation, evidence a real advocate of that view would actually use. Sourcing both sides is the visible proof that your fairness is practiced rather than performed.
Keep emotional weight in the case, not the citations. The opening scene may legitimately move a reader; the evidence paragraphs must not lean on that. Once the argument starts, every sentence should hold up if the reader feels nothing, because a grader testing your logic will read it exactly that way.
Avoid the five mistakes that cost points here
- An agreeable thesis. A claim every reader accepts before your first citation leaves the argument rows with nothing to score.
- A strawman opposition. One weak sentence of what critics say, promptly demolished, forfeits the fairness row it pretends to answer.
- Altitude drift. Opening at the bedside and concluding with sweeping system redesign, or the reverse, breaks the argument's chain of relevance.
- Principles named but never applied. Dropping justice and autonomy into paragraphs without showing what each demands in your case is vocabulary, not reasoning.
- A close that only restates. Ending with a summary of your reasons, instead of the conduct they require, leaves the paper one paragraph short of done.
Check before you submit
- Your thesis has a reasonable denial you could write in one sentence
- Every reason pairs a named principle with a dated source
- The opposition paragraph could be signed by an actual opponent
- The rebuttal concedes something real before it outweighs it
- The whole argument stays at the nurse's altitude
- The close names conduct, not just conclusions
Writing the position week for NR-395?
Send the instructions and the rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the claim sharpened and both sides properly sourced, and revisions run until the grade lands.