NR-719 opens where advanced practice leadership actually starts: with a change you want and cannot order. The first stage of a negotiation and collaborative communication course typically asks you to convert a practice problem into a specific ask directed at specific people, which is a harder piece of writing than it sounds. The graded move is precision about what you are requesting, who has to agree, and what agreement would look like in writing. Your section may print this as NR 719 or NR719; 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-719 Week 1 asks for
A nurse practitioner on a 34-bed medical-surgical unit spent seven months trying to get nurse-initiated catheter removal adopted and never once made a request. She raised it in three unit council meetings, sent the appraised evidence to two physicians, and put a slide in a quality huddle. Every one of those actions was a communication. None of them was an ask. Nobody had ever been told what specifically they were being invited to approve, by when, or what would change on the following Monday if they said yes. When she finally wrote the request as a single sentence naming the medical director of the service, the exact standing order language, and the date the pilot would start on one unit, it was approved in eleven days. Nothing about the evidence had changed. The ask had come into existence.
That gap is the territory of this opening stage. Doctoral leadership writing at this level is not about advocacy in general; it is about the conversion of an evidence-supported intention into a proposition a named party can accept or refuse. The written work in a negotiation course usually begins with that conversion, sometimes as a short case setup, sometimes as a problem statement with the parties identified, sometimes as a posted introduction of the practice change you will carry through the session.
Register matters from the first line. This is a practice doctorate, so the change you are proposing translates existing evidence into a local practice, and the writing should say so plainly rather than framing the work as an original investigation. You are not proposing to discover whether nurse-driven removal protocols reduce device days; the literature has addressed that. You are proposing that this organization, with these constraints and these people, adopt something already established, and the interesting problem is entirely in the agreement.
Expect the work to be short and dense. A two-credit doctoral course tends to run compact deliverables, which removes the place where vague writing usually hides. A weak version of this opening piece describes a problem for six paragraphs and gets to the request in a subordinate clause on the last page. A strong version puts the ask in the first forty words and spends the rest of the space making it credible.
The NR-719 Week 1 method, step by step
Six moves that turn a practice problem into something a person can say yes to.
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Isolate the single decision you actually need
Most practice changes contain three or four decisions bundled together: a protocol change, a documentation change, a staffing implication and a budget item. Write them as separate lines, then pick the one that unlocks the others. Negotiating a bundle usually means losing on the weakest element in it.
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Name the party with the authority to grant it
Not the department, the role. Standing order language is approved by someone; an order set is built by someone; a policy is retired by someone. Write the role title and, in your own working notes, the person, then confirm the authority rather than assuming it. Asking the wrong party costs weeks and credibility.
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State the ask in one sentence with a verb and a date
Approve, sign, release, fund, assign, pilot. A sentence built on consider or support has not asked for anything. The date is not a deadline you impose but a proposed start that makes the request concrete and gives the other party something to negotiate about.
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Define what yes will look like on paper
An approved change exists as an artifact: a signed protocol, a revised order set, a line in a policy, an email that a manager can forward. Say which artifact you are seeking. Agreements that live only in a conversation dissolve at the first staffing crisis.
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Bound the request so refusal is expensive to justify
One unit, one shift pattern, one patient population, a defined review point. A tightly bounded pilot converts a large institutional risk into a small reversible one, and it changes the question the other party is answering from whether they believe you to whether they can tolerate a limited trial.
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Write the refusal you expect and answer it in advance
Draft the strongest version of the objection in the other party's own language, then write your response beneath it. If you cannot state their objection in a form they would accept as fair, you do not yet understand the negotiation, and the paper will show it.
A layout and word budget for an opening negotiation case setup
Our frame for the opening written piece in this course, sized for roughly 900 to 1,200 words, which is typical for compact doctoral deliverables. This outline is ours 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 ask, stated first | One sentence naming the decision, the role who grants it, the proposed start and the artifact that would record it. | 60 to 90 |
| The practice problem, in local numbers | What is happening in your setting, counted from a source you can name, with the base and the window attached. | 170 to 210 |
| What the evidence already settles | The established practice you are translating, cited, with the sentence that says this is adoption rather than discovery. | 170 to 210 |
| The parties | Everyone whose work changes and everyone whose approval is required, listed by role with what each controls. | 150 to 190 |
| Boundaries of the request | Scope, duration, population and the review point that makes the trial reversible. | 120 to 160 |
| The anticipated objection | The strongest refusal written in the other party's terms, with your response and what you would concede. | 170 to 210 |
Evidence craft for a negotiation setup
Local numbers carry the problem; literature carries the solution. The reason to act is what is happening in your setting, and the reason to believe the proposed action works is published. Mixing those two up produces the common failure where a paper argues a national statistic at a manager who wants to know about their own unit.
Say where a local number came from and over what period. Twenty-two indwelling catheter days across one 30-day period on a single unit, taken from the daily device count the charge nurses already record, is a usable figure. A percentage with no denominator and no source is an assertion, and in a negotiation it is the first thing a skeptical party will push on.
Cite the practice standard, not just a study. Where a professional body or a national improvement program has already published guidance on the change you want, name it with its year. Negotiations move faster when the other party can see that the request is aligned with something external rather than with your preference.
Write other parties at the level of accountability. Do not name individuals or attribute motives in a document you do not control. The hospitalist group becomes the service accountable for length of stay on the affected unit, which is more accurate and more useful, because it points at what would have to be true for them to agree.
Keep any patient detail de-identified. If a specific case illustrates the problem, strip identifiers and enough context that no patient or colleague could be recognized. The illustrative value survives; the exposure does not.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- Advocacy with no addressee. A paper arguing that something should change, with nobody named who could change it, has described a wish rather than set up a negotiation.
- The ask buried on the last page. Executive and clinical readers both decide early. If your request appears after 800 words of background, it has been read as a complaint.
- Framing translation as research. Writing that you will study whether the intervention works misstates what a practice doctorate does and reads as a category error at this level.
- An unbounded request. Asking a system to adopt something everywhere, permanently, from the first conversation invites a refusal that is cheaper than a yes.
- Objections written as strawmen. A resistance paragraph that only lists bad reasons for saying no shows the grader that the other side was never seriously considered.
Before you submit
- The ask appears in the first paragraph as one sentence with a verb
- The role holding the authority to grant it is named
- The artifact that would record a yes is specified
- Local numbers carry a source, a base and a time window
- The evidence paragraph says plainly that this is adoption of established practice
- Scope, duration and a review point bound the request
- The strongest objection is stated in terms the other party would accept as fair
Starting NR-719 this week?
Send the instructions and the rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the ask stated in the opening line and the objection answered in the other party's own terms, and revisions run until the grade lands.