NR-721 Week 1 Mapping the Interprofessional System: How to Write It

What NR-721 Week 1 asks for

What does a broken system actually look like from the floor? A federally qualified health center in a mid-sized city ran a diabetes program that every professional in the building believed in. The medical assistants checked feet. The pharmacist ran a medication review clinic on Tuesdays. A behavioral health consultant sat two doors down. A community health worker carried a caseload of the hardest-to-reach patients and knew their bus routes. Every one of those services was good, and the center's average glycemic control had not moved in three years. When a new clinical director finally sat down with a legal pad and drew who talked to whom about a single patient, the drawing explained everything: the pharmacist's notes lived in a separate module the medical assistants never opened, the community health worker reported to a grant-funded program manager who reported to nobody in the clinical line, and the behavioral health consultant's warm handoff depended on a physician remembering to walk down the hall. Nothing was broken. Everything was disconnected.

That drawing is the genre this stage teaches. The territory of an opening systems stage is the structure of interprofessional work: who holds which decision, who holds which information, where accountability changes hands, and what the gaps between those handoffs cost. A course numbered as a second course in a leadership sequence assumes you have already argued for your own role and your own leadership style. This one asks you to look outward at the arrangement of other people's work.

Deliverables at this stage in an eight-week session tend to be moderate in length and analytic in shape: a written system or stakeholder analysis, sometimes with a table or a described map, often paired with an introductory posting that states the organizational problem you will carry through the session. If your section runs a discussion this week, write it as final copy from the first keystroke, because posts do not reopen once submitted in Canvas and a vague problem statement in week one becomes seven weeks of vague papers.

Doctoral altitude matters here and is the row students most often lose. A practice doctorate prepares you to translate existing evidence into a change at a site, not to generate new knowledge about collaboration in general. So the paper is not a literature essay about why teamwork is good. It is an analysis of one real system, evidenced against published frameworks, aimed at a change somebody could actually authorize. If your reader cannot tell which building you are writing about by the end of page two, the altitude is wrong.

Expect one discomfort. Mapping a system honestly means writing down that a named function reports outside the clinical line, or that two professions duplicate an assessment because neither trusts the other's documentation. Students soften this into communication could be improved. The sentence that scores names the structural feature, says what it produces, and stops short of blaming a person.

The NR-721 Week 1 method, step by step

Six moves that turn an impression of a messy system into a defensible analysis.

1. Reduce each scoring row to its verb before you choose a site

   Analyze, evaluate, synthesize and propose demand different depths and different amounts of evidence. A row that says evaluate is asking for criteria and a judgment, which is a different paper from the one a row saying describe would accept.

2. Fix the boundary of the system in one sentence

   Name the setting, the population, the professions involved and the process you are following. One clinic, one patient pathway, four professional groups is analyzable in 1,500 words. An entire health system is not, and unbounded scope is the most common reason these papers thin out.

3. Follow one real pathway from entry to closure

   Take a single common journey through your setting and write down every point at which responsibility, information or a decision changes hands. Handoffs are where interprofessional systems fail, and you cannot see them from an organizational chart.

4. Separate the formal structure from the working structure

   The chart shows reporting lines. The pathway shows who actually resolves problems. Where the two diverge, you have found the analytic content of your paper, and naming that divergence is what distinguishes doctoral writing from an orientation summary.

5. Attach each observed feature to a published framework

   Interprofessional competency frameworks, systems and complexity literature, and organizational behavior scholarship all give you named constructs for what you are seeing. Use their terms precisely and cite them; do not invent your own vocabulary for a phenomenon that already has a name.

6. Close on a problem statement narrow enough to survive eight weeks

   State the gap, the population affected, the setting and the direction of the desired change in one or two sentences. This becomes the spine of every later stage, so a version that is still fuzzy at the end of week one will cost you repeatedly.

A layout and word budget for a system and stakeholder analysis

The frame our tutors keep beside an opening systems analysis, sized for roughly 1,400 to 1,700 words. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree. Scale the targets proportionally if your assigned length differs.

Evidence craft for organizational analysis

An organizational claim needs a source in the same way a clinical claim does. Statements about what interprofessional collaboration requires, what fragmented accountability produces, or how teams behave under ambiguity all belong to a published literature. Doctoral graders read the citation pattern first, and a systems paper running entirely on the author's own observation loses the support row before content is even weighed.

Distinguish what you observed from what you were told. A clinic manager saying that handoffs work well is data about the manager's belief, not about handoffs. Write it as such: staff describe the process as reliable, while the pathway walk-through showed two points where no receiving party is named. That distinction is analysis, and it costs one clause.

Every internal number carries its base and its window. If you report how often a referral closed the loop, say how many of how many referrals across what period. Nineteen of 143 behavioral health referrals over one quarter had a documented return note. Thirteen percent alone is a figure nobody can weigh, and internal operational data is exactly where graders check whether you understand denominators.

De-identify everything, including the organization if your rubric requires it. No patient details, no named staff, no identifiers that would let a reader locate an individual. Where you need texture, write the role rather than the person: the pharmacist covering Tuesday clinic, not a name. This is a habit graders notice, and it is also simply correct.

Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory

• The whole health system as the unit of analysis. Scope that wide produces generalities. One pathway in one setting produces findings.
• An essay about the value of teamwork. The literature agreeing that collaboration matters is the premise of the course, not the argument of your paper.
• Blaming a discipline. Writing that a professional group does not communicate converts a structural finding into an accusation and forfeits the analytic tone doctoral rubrics reward.
• The organizational chart mistaken for the system. Reporting lines explain very little about how a patient actually moves; the handoffs do.
• A problem statement that could describe any clinic in the country. If nothing in it is specific to your setting, week five has nothing to implement.

Before you submit

• The system boundary is stated explicitly, with the reason for it
• At least one full pathway appears with every handoff named
• Each stakeholder group has an accountability, a control and a loss attached
• Two or more structural findings are named in published, cited language
• Internal figures appear with their denominators and their time window
• The closing problem statement names outcome, population and setting

Questions students ask about this stage

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