Late in a 192-hour block the question that decides whether the change survives is not clinical, it is economic: what does this cost to run, who pays for it, and what would have to be true for the organization to keep it after you leave. The written task is a resource narrative built from real inputs rather than a borrowed cost-effectiveness template, and it is the section most DNP students underwrite. Your section may print this as NR 707B or NR707B; 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 NR-707B Week 6 asks for
A telehealth follow-up program can be described in two entirely accurate ways. One says it prevented avoidable returns for a vulnerable population. The other says it consumes eleven hours of registered nurse time per week, a licence seat, and forty minutes of scheduling coordination, and it currently exists because one nurse absorbed it around an existing assignment. Both sentences are true. Only the second one tells a director whether the program will exist in March. A practice doctorate is meant to be fluent in the second language, and this stage is where you demonstrate it.
The boundary that governs this manual. Practicum hours, the hour log, encounter counts, site paperwork, and preceptor or mentor evaluations are your own record of work you personally performed, verified by your school and your site. They are never drafted, reconstructed, or estimated with help, and no writing support of any kind touches them. Your own practicum hours are also not the project's labor cost, and conflating the two is a specific analytic error this stage should correct. What can be supported is the written layer: how a resource narrative is built, how an assumption is disclosed, how a sustainability argument is organized. Everything drawn from real operations enters the page de-identified and at aggregate level.
The framing that scores at doctoral level is resource use rather than accounting. You are almost never in a position to produce a validated financial analysis, and pretending otherwise is worse than declining to. What you can produce is a defensible inventory: the labor minutes the change consumes and by which role, the one-time inputs it required, the recurring inputs it needs, what it displaced, and what a plausible range of avoided cost looks like if the outcome held. State every assumption in the sentence where it is used, and give ranges rather than single figures wherever the input is uncertain.
Expect the deliverable to be a resource, cost, or sustainability section inside a late progress document, sometimes with a table, and often a posted discussion where classmates argue about whether their projects would survive without them. That discussion question is not rhetorical. A change that requires a doctoral student's unpaid attention to function is a change with a defined expiry date, and writing that honestly is more valuable than an optimistic projection nobody at the site would sign.
The NR-707B Week 6 method, step by step
Six analytic moves for writing what the change actually consumes.
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1. Inventory inputs by role and by minute
List every person the change touches, what it asks of each, and how long it takes them. Registered nurse minutes, unit clerk minutes, pharmacist minutes, scheduler minutes. Roles have different costs and different scarcity, and an undifferentiated hours figure hides both.
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2. Separate one-time inputs from recurring ones
Build work, training sessions, printed material, and configuration are start-up costs paid once. Per-case time, ongoing audit, and refresher training are the recurring load that determines survival. Mixing them produces a number that answers no question.
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3. Attribute your own hours correctly
Practicum hours are educational, not operational. Write explicitly which activities the organization would have to staff after you leave, and price those. This single move separates a serious sustainability analysis from a hopeful one.
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4. Quantify what the change displaced
Time is conserved on a busy unit. If forty seconds per admission went to a new screening, name what shortened. If a scheduler absorbed coordination, name what slipped. Displacement is a cost even when no money moved.
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5. Model avoided cost as a range with stated assumptions
If the outcome held at the observed level across a year, what would that mean in events avoided, and what does the literature or your finance department say each event costs. Give a low and a high, name every assumption, and refuse to present a single confident figure.
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6. State the sustainability condition as a testable sentence
This change is sustainable if a named role retains a named amount of time and a named owner keeps the audit running. Written that way, the condition can be checked. Written as continued organizational support, it cannot.
A layout for a resource and sustainability section
Our frame for this stage's written work, sized for roughly 1,100 to 1,400 words plus a resource table. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| What the change consumes | Inputs by role, with minutes per case or per week and how the estimate was produced. | 200 to 250 |
| One-time versus recurring | Start-up inputs already spent, separated from the ongoing load the organization would carry. | 170 to 210 |
| Your hours versus operational hours | Which activities you personally absorbed, and what staffing would be needed to replace them. | 160 to 200 |
| Displacement | What the change pushed aside, in time or attention, with the observation behind the claim. | 150 to 190 |
| Avoided cost, bounded | A low and a high estimate, each assumption named in the sentence that uses it. | 200 to 250 |
| Sustainability condition | The specific, checkable conditions under which the change continues without you. | 180 to 220 |
Evidence craft for resource writing
Every figure carries its provenance in the same sentence. Say whether a minute count came from timing eight observed cases, from a staff estimate, or from a system report, and say how many observations produced it. A number without provenance in a cost section is the fastest route to a comment asking where it came from.
Prefer ranges and refuse false precision. An avoided-cost estimate of forty-one thousand dollars implies an accuracy nobody has. A range with its assumptions visible, presented as illustrative rather than definitive, is both more honest and more useful to a decision maker who wants to substitute their own numbers.
Use published cost figures carefully and attribute them. Cost-per-event figures in the literature come from specific systems, payer mixes, and years, and they travel badly. Name the source, the year, and the setting, and say in a clause why it is a reasonable or an imperfect proxy for yours. If your finance department can supply a local figure, that outranks any published one.
Keep the improvement frame. This is a local resource analysis for a local change. It is not an economic evaluation, it does not establish value in the technical sense, and the write-up should say so rather than borrowing the vocabulary of formal cost-effectiveness work. Where a determination about human subjects oversight applies at your organization, describe the process you followed rather than predicting its outcome.
Write for the person who signs. A director reads a resource section looking for one thing: what am I being asked to fund, and for how long. Put that sentence early and plainly. Scholarly hedging is appropriate around estimates and inappropriate around the request itself.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- Counting practicum hours as free labor. The moment you leave, that labor has to come from somewhere, and a plan that ignores it is a plan with a hidden vacancy.
- Start-up and recurring costs blended. The organization needs the recurring figure to decide, and a blended number answers a question nobody asked.
- A single confident savings figure. Precision the data cannot support reads as inexperience to any reader who has built a budget.
- Cost figures with no source or year. A per-event cost lifted from a paper without its setting is an unattributed guess with a decimal point.
- Sustainability written as a hope. Continued leadership support is not a condition; a named role holding named time is.
Before you submit
- Inputs are inventoried by role, with minutes and the method that produced them
- One-time and recurring inputs are separated explicitly
- Your own practicum hours are identified and excluded from the operational load
- Displacement is named, with the observation supporting it
- Any avoided-cost estimate is a range with every assumption stated in text
- The sustainability condition names a role, an amount of time, and an owner
Writing the resource narrative for NR-707B?
Send the rubric and your input estimates out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with inputs itemized by role, assumptions disclosed in text, and a sustainability condition somebody could check, and revisions run until the grade lands.