The second stage of a concluding leadership practicum is where the setting stops being scenery and becomes data. The written work is an organizational or microsystem assessment: what this unit or service line actually does, for whom, at what volume, through which handoffs, under whose authority, and where the existing documentation says it strains. Written well, it is the evidence base that every later stage of NR-670 draws on. Your section may print this as NR 670 or NR670; 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.
What a usable assessment write-up delivers
A charge nurse in an ambulatory infusion center once opened her assessment stage by pulling six months of scheduling exception reports and counting, by hand, how many appointments had been moved after the pharmacy had already mixed a dose. The number was 41. That single audited count did more work in her capstone than four paragraphs about how busy the department was, because it turned a felt problem into a countable one, and countable problems are what leadership writing is built from.
The territory of this stage is structured description. You are being asked to characterize a care system rather than to complain about it or to celebrate it, and characterization has parts: purpose, population, throughput, process steps, information flow, staffing and skill mix, decision rights, and the measures already being collected. A reader who finishes your assessment should be able to draw the process on a whiteboard and point to the place where it leaks, without ever having set foot in your building.
Deliverables at this depth are typically a written assessment of the practicum setting, often with one table or a described process map, and sometimes a posted response comparing your setting to a published model of care coordination. Length usually rises here compared with the opening stage, because description with evidence takes room. If your section runs a discussion, treat the post as final copy: posts do not reopen after submission in Canvas, and a claim about your own unit is easy for a grader to test for internal consistency against the paper you file the same week.
The boundary that governs this whole course applies here in a specific way. Your practicum hours, the activity log, and any evaluation your mentor completes are your own verified record and are never drafted, reconstructed or estimated with help. What a manual supports is the written analysis built from what you genuinely observed. Everything that reaches the page is de-identified before it gets there: no patient names or initials, no dates of service, no staff members identifiable by role plus detail, and no organization named where your program asks that it not be. A de-identified count is still evidence; an identifiable anecdote is a liability regardless of how well it is written.
The NR-670 Week 2 method, step by step
Six moves that turn a familiar workplace into a documented system a reader can evaluate.
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Write the purpose of the microsystem in one sentence
Which population, which service, delivered how often, toward what outcome. If you cannot compress it, you are probably describing a building rather than a care system, and every later section will inherit that vagueness.
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Count the throughput before you describe the process
Visits, admissions, transfers, discharges or infusions across a stated period. Volume calibrates everything a reader will judge next, including whether the intervention you propose in week five is proportionate to the problem.
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Trace one patient journey end to end and mark the handoffs
Follow a single de-identified path from entry to exit, noting every point where responsibility or information changes hands. Handoffs are where coordination fails, and a numbered trace makes those points visible instead of implied.
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Read the documentation that already exists
Audit files, incident summaries, chart review results, satisfaction reports, policy documents and standard work. Say what each one covers, over what period, and what it shows. Existing documentation is the cheapest and most defensible evidence in a practicum.
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Map decision rights, not the org chart
Name who can change the process you are studying: who approves a documentation standard, who owns the order set, who chairs the council that would adopt it. An accurate map of authority is what makes a later implementation plan credible.
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Close with a ranked list of gaps and the evidence behind each
Two or three, each attached to the audit, count or observation that exposed it. Ranking is the leadership act; a flat list of everything wrong tells your reader you have not yet decided what matters most.
A layout and word budget for a microsystem assessment
Our frame for a setting assessment, sized for roughly 1,300 to 1,600 words. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose and population | What this microsystem exists to do, for which population, and the outcome it is accountable for. | 140 to 170 |
| Volume and staffing | Throughput across a stated window, skill mix, coverage pattern, and the ratio the unit actually runs at. | 190 to 230 |
| Process and handoffs | One traced journey with each transfer of responsibility or information numbered and named. | 260 to 320 |
| Existing documentation | The audits, incident summaries and reports already collected, each with its coverage period and what it shows in counts. | 240 to 300 |
| Authority and culture | Who can change what, which forum adopts standards, and how frontline staff currently raise problems. | 190 to 230 |
| Ranked gaps | Two or three failure points in priority order, each carrying the specific evidence that put it on the list. | 220 to 270 |
Evidence craft for organizational description
Use a named assessment framework and attribute it. Published models exist for describing clinical microsystems and care coordination structures, and adopting one gives your reader a standard to check your description against. Name the model and its source in the sentence, then use its categories rather than inventing your own headings.
State the coverage period of every internal document you cite. An audit of twenty charts is a different claim from an audit of every chart in a quarter. Write what was reviewed, how many, and across what dates, then let the reader weigh it. Internal evidence is admissible in a capstone precisely because it is specific; strip the specificity and it becomes assertion.
Separate what you observed from what you were told. Both are legitimate in a practicum write-up and they carry different weight. Attribute plainly: observation over four shifts, or a description provided by the unit's quality lead. Blending the two into a single confident voice is the fastest way to lose the analysis row.
Describe culture through behavior, not adjectives. Supportive and siloed tell a grader nothing. Write that safety events are reviewed in a standing forum where frontline staff present cases, or that the same coordination failure appeared in three separate incident summaries without a documented follow-up, and the culture claim carries itself.
Keep the comparison honest. If you contrast your setting with a published benchmark, name the benchmark, its source and its population, and say whether that population resembles yours. A benchmark drawn from a different care setting is still useful as a reference point, but only if you say so in the sentence where you use it.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- A tour of the building. Square footage, bed count and the history of the department are not an assessment unless each fact does analytic work later in the paper.
- Process described without handoffs. Coordination failures live at transfer points, so a description that never names one has skipped the part the course exists to teach.
- Complaint in place of analysis. Understaffing stated as a grievance is unscoreable; understaffing stated as a coverage pattern against a volume figure is evidence.
- Ignoring the documentation that already exists. Writing an assessment from memory when audit files sit in a shared drive is the most common avoidable loss in this stage.
- Identifiable detail smuggled in as color. A specific date, a room number or a distinctive diagnosis can identify a person even with no name attached.
Before you submit
- The purpose of the microsystem is stated in one compressed sentence
- Volume appears as counts across a named period
- At least one traced journey names every handoff by number
- Every internal document cited carries its coverage period
- A named assessment framework is attributed with its source
- Gaps are ranked, and each carries the evidence that put it on the list
- Nothing on the page could identify a patient or a colleague
Writing the NR-670 setting assessment?
Send the rubric and your notes out of Canvas. A premium original draft of the written analysis comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the handoffs traced, the internal evidence attributed by period, and the gaps ranked, and revisions run until the grade lands.