Midway through NR-715 the course usually stops describing the degree and starts pointing it at something. This stage asks you to identify a practice problem that a doctoral project could actually change: one that exists in your setting, that has evidence already sitting behind it, that can be measured with data you can reach, and that someone with authority cares about. The screening test for a candidate problem is simple and unforgiving. If solving it would require producing new knowledge, it is the wrong problem for a practice doctorate. Your section may print this as NR 715 or NR715; 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-715 Week 4 asks for
Consider a nurse practitioner in a six-provider family medicine group who notices that children discharged from the emergency department after a wheezing episode rarely appear for the follow-up visit the discharge paperwork tells families to book. She has watched this for three years. She could name eight reasons without opening a chart. That noticing is where a doctoral project starts, and it is also where most students stop, because a problem that everyone in the building already accepts is invisible until somebody counts it.
The territory of this stage is problem identification done properly. A usable practice problem has five features and a doctoral reader checks each one. It is a gap between what evidence or guidance recommends and what is actually delivered, not a mystery about what works. It is local and specific, attached to a defined population and a defined process. It is measurable with data that already exists somewhere you can legitimately reach. It matters to somebody with authority, which is what determines whether a project survives contact with a schedule. And it is proportionate to one program, which usually means smaller than your first instinct.
The most common failure is scope. A student who wants to reduce pediatric asthma exacerbations across a county has chosen an outcome influenced by housing, air quality, insurance, medication cost and adherence, none of which a single clinician can move in the time available. The same student who focuses on whether children leaving the emergency department are contacted within a defined window and get a scheduled appointment has chosen a process she can influence, measure and report. Process outcomes close to your own reach are not a lesser ambition; they are the correct altitude for a project that has to finish.
The second failure is problems chosen for the wrong reason. A topic that interests you is not the same as a problem that hurts your organization. Expect the written work to be a problem identification or topic proposal piece, sometimes with a short evidence scan attached, sometimes with a posted response. Posts do not reopen once submitted in Canvas, so write the board entry as final copy.
The NR-715 Week 4 method, step by step
Six moves for choosing and defending a doctoral practice problem.
-
Write the gap as two sentences before anything else
One sentence for what should happen according to existing guidance, one for what does happen in your setting. If you cannot write the first sentence with a source attached, you have a research question rather than a practice problem and the topic needs to change now, not in the final stage.
-
Count something small before you commit
Pull whatever you can legitimately access and produce one honest number with its denominator and period. Twenty-two of 143 children over three months is a problem statement in embryo. Everyone knows this is not, and a doctoral grader will say so.
-
Confirm that the evidence already exists
Run a quick scan and look for guidance, systematic reviews or improvement reports on the same gap. Finding a body of evidence is the point, not a disappointment, because a practice doctorate needs something to translate. Finding nothing is a signal to change topics.
-
Name the process, not just the outcome
Draw the steps between the clinical event and the desired result, then find the step that leaks. Projects that target a step succeed; projects that target an outcome three steps away from anything you control tend to end the program undelivered.
-
Test the problem against a stakeholder who could stop it
Ask yourself who has to give time, access or approval, and whether the problem you chose matters to them in their own terms. A practice manager cares about no-show rates and payer quality measures; a project framed only in nursing language often stalls at exactly that desk.
-
Shrink the scope until it fits the time you have
Reduce population, setting or process until a change could plausibly be implemented and evaluated inside the program. Write the reduction down as a deliberate decision with reasons, because an explicitly bounded scope reads as judgment while an unstated one reads as naivety.
A layout and word budget for a problem identification piece
Our frame for a topic proposal at this stage, sized for roughly 1,200 to 1,600 words. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| The gap in two sentences | What guidance recommends, then what your setting delivers, both sourced, before any background at all. | 80 to 110 |
| Setting and population | The practice, its size, the panel or population affected, and the process the problem lives inside. | 200 to 250 |
| Local magnitude | Your own count with its denominator and window, plus how you obtained it and what it cannot tell you. | 220 to 270 |
| National context | Why this gap is recognized beyond your building, with sources and the scale of the problem stated. | 200 to 250 |
| Evidence availability | What already exists that could be translated, named at the level of guidance and review rather than individual studies. | 200 to 240 |
| Feasibility and stakeholders | Who must agree, what data you can reach, and the scope decision you made with its reasoning. | 200 to 250 |
| Why this fits a practice doctorate | One paragraph placing the problem on the translation side, with any research element flagged and set aside. | 120 to 160 |
Evidence craft for problem identification
Give the local number and the national number in the same section. A problem is credible when it is both recognized in the literature and demonstrated in your setting. One without the other reads as either an academic exercise or a personal complaint, and graders separate those two failures reliably.
Say where your local data came from and what it excludes. A count pulled from scheduling records misses children whose families called and could not get through. Naming that limitation in the sentence where the number appears is doctoral practice, and omitting it is the fastest way to lose an evaluation row.
Reach for guidance and synthesis rather than single studies at this stage. You are establishing that a body of evidence exists, not appraising it yet. Recommendations from national bodies, systematic reviews and published improvement reports are the right altitude for a problem identification piece.
Keep every patient detail de-identified. If a specific case illustrates the gap, strip anything that could identify the child, the family or the encounter, and say in the text that details have been altered or removed. This is not optional at doctoral level and readers check.
Describe the problem in the organization's own metrics where they exist. Follow-up intervals, recall completion, referral closure and quality measure performance are the language decisions get made in, and a problem stated in those terms travels further than the same problem stated only as a clinical concern.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- A topic instead of a problem. Pediatric obesity is a subject. Children with a body mass index above the referral threshold who never reach the nutrition service is a problem with a countable gap.
- No local number anywhere. A problem asserted from experience alone cannot be evaluated later, because there is nothing to compare a change against.
- Scope that no clinician could deliver. County-level outcomes, multi-system rollouts and problems requiring new funding are the most common reason a project stalls.
- A gap with no evidence behind it. If nothing published addresses your problem, a practice doctorate has nothing to translate and the topic is wrong for the degree.
- Ignoring who has to say yes. A problem nobody with authority recognizes will consume a stage of negotiation you did not budget for.
Before you submit
- The gap appears as two sourced sentences before any background
- One local count is reported with its denominator, period and source
- What that count cannot capture is stated in the same section
- National recognition of the problem is documented
- Existing evidence available for translation is named
- The scope decision is written as a deliberate choice with reasons
- Every patient detail used as illustration is de-identified
Choosing your NR-715 problem?
Send the rubric and your draft topic out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the gap stated in two sourced sentences and the scope argued, and revisions run until the grade lands.