By the third stage of a concluding leadership practicum the setting has been described and the pressure moves to precision. The written work is a problem statement and gap analysis: the distance between what your care system is achieving and what a defensible standard says it should achieve, stated in measurable terms, with the causes traced rather than guessed. This is the sentence the rest of NR-670 is built 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 defensible problem statement achieves
A nurse leader in a post-acute service spent an evening reconciling two documents that should have agreed: the discharge summary the hospital sent, and the medication list the receiving facility entered on admission. Across 30 consecutive transfers she found a discrepancy in 19 of them. That reconciliation audit was not the practicum project. It was the thing that made the problem statement possible, because it replaced medication reconciliation is inconsistent with a countable gap between an achievable standard and current performance.
A problem statement in graduate leadership writing has a fixed anatomy. It names the population affected, the process that is failing them, the current performance in measurable terms, the standard or benchmark that current performance falls short of, and the consequence of the shortfall in outcomes, cost or risk. Miss any one of those five and the statement becomes an opinion. Include all five in two or three sentences and everything downstream, the evidence search, the intervention design, the measurement plan, has a fixed target to serve.
Gap analysis is the second half of the stage and the part students most often skip. Naming a gap is description; explaining why it persists is analysis. Structured cause tracing, whether you use a cause and effect diagram, a five whys chain, a process failure inventory or a driver diagram, forces you past the first explanation that occurs to you. The first explanation in nursing is almost always staffing or education, and both are usually symptoms of something structural: a form that does not carry the field, a handoff with no defined owner, a report nobody reads, a step performed differently on nights than on days.
The standing boundary applies here with particular force, because this stage runs on real records. Your practicum hours, activity logs and any evaluation your mentor completes are your own verified documents and are never drafted, reconstructed or estimated with help. What a manual supports is the written reasoning built from what you legitimately reviewed. Every case detail that appears in the analysis is de-identified before it reaches the page: report the 19 discrepancies as a count, not as nineteen stories, and keep dates, initials and distinguishing clinical detail out of the document entirely.
The NR-670 Week 3 method, step by step
Six moves that turn an observed failure into an analyzed, measurable problem.
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Fix the unit of measurement before you write a sentence
Decide what is being counted and out of what: discrepancies per transfer, readmissions per hundred discharges, minutes from order to administration. A problem you cannot count is a problem you cannot close, and week six will need this unit again.
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Establish current performance from a defined sample
State how many records or observations, selected how, over which period, and what proportion failed. A consecutive sample of 30 is more defensible than a convenience sample of 100, and saying which one you used is itself a scored competency.
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Name the standard the performance falls short of
A published guideline, a regulatory expectation, an organizational policy or a benchmark from the literature. Attribute it with its issuing body and year. Without a standard there is no gap, only a number you happen to dislike.
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Trace causes with a structured tool, not intuition
Run the failure through a named framework and record what each branch produced. Sort the results into what is inside your influence and what is not, because the intervention you design in week five can only act on the first list.
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Quantify the consequence in a currency the organization uses
Excess days, avoidable transfers, staff rework hours, safety events, or patient experience scores. Leadership audiences act on consequence, and a gap analysis that stops at incidence has not made its case for resourcing.
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Write the statement, then cut it to three sentences
Population, process, current performance, standard, consequence. If it takes a paragraph, the thinking is not finished. Compression at this stage is not stylistic; it is proof that the problem has an edge.
A layout and word budget for a gap analysis
Our frame for a problem statement with cause analysis, sized for roughly 1,200 to 1,500 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Problem statement | Population, failing process, current performance, standard and consequence, compressed into two or three sentences. | 80 to 110 |
| How current performance was established | Sample size, selection method, review period, what counted as a failure, and who did the reviewing. | 200 to 250 |
| The standard and its source | The guideline, policy or benchmark being fallen short of, attributed with issuing body and year, and its applicability to your population. | 180 to 220 |
| Cause analysis | The named framework, the branches it produced, and the evidence supporting each candidate cause. | 300 to 360 |
| Consequence | What the gap costs in outcomes, risk, rework or resource, expressed in units the organization already tracks. | 180 to 230 |
| What is actionable | Which causes sit inside the practicum's reach and which do not, with the reasoning for the split. | 160 to 200 |
Evidence craft for problem definition
Report your audit like a methods section. How many records, chosen how, across what dates, judged against what criterion, reviewed by whom. A grader who can reconstruct your review can trust your number; a number introduced with a review of recent charts showed is worth nothing at capstone level.
Distinguish a benchmark from a target. A benchmark is what comparable systems achieve, a target is what your organization has committed to, and a standard is what a guideline requires. They are frequently different figures and mixing them silently is a precision error that leadership faculty notice immediately.
Attribute causes at the level you can defend. Documented causes come from incident reviews or process observation; inferred causes come from your reasoning and should be labeled as such. Writing that staff report the field is often blank is defensible; writing that staff do not value documentation is an accusation dressed as analysis.
Do not let percentages travel alone. Sixty-three percent of transfers had a discrepancy means little without the 19 of 30 behind it, and small denominators change how much weight a reader should give the figure. In a capstone, the base is part of the honesty of the claim.
Say what would falsify your problem statement. One sentence naming the alternative explanation you considered and the evidence that argued against it does more for the analysis row than another paragraph of support. Leadership writing that has never entertained a rival account reads as advocacy.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- A problem statement with no number in it. If nothing is measured, week six has nothing to measure again, and the capstone cannot demonstrate change.
- Education named as the root cause. It is occasionally true and usually the place analysis stops early; run the framework and see what sits underneath it.
- The standard left unattributed. A gap requires a reference point, and a reference point without a source and year is an assertion about what ought to be.
- Consequence stated as harm in general. Patient safety is at risk is unscoreable; excess days, avoidable transfers or rework hours are the currency leadership audiences read.
- Case narrative in place of aggregate. Retelling individual encounters risks identifying people and weakens the argument, because one story is not a rate.
Before you submit
- The problem statement fits in three sentences and contains a measured value
- Sample size, selection method and review period all appear
- The standard is named with its issuing body and year
- Cause analysis uses a named framework and the framework is attributed
- Each candidate cause is labeled as documented or inferred
- Consequence is expressed in a unit the organization already tracks
- No individual case is identifiable anywhere in the document
Stuck on the NR-670 problem statement?
Send the rubric and your audit notes out of Canvas. A premium original draft of the written analysis comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the gap stated in measurable terms and the causes traced through a named framework, and revisions run until the grade lands.