For the first section of your final capstone project you will develop a proposal for an intervention plan to fulfill a need within a specific population. This assignment is meant to capture your initial thoughts about the need and impacting factors to help focus your in-depth analysis later on in the course. The discussion from Unit 1 will have helped you brainstorm and crystallize some of your ideas for this assignment, specifically ideas around needs, a target population, and some initial support from the literature and other sources of evidence. The problem statement is an important part of your capstone project as it will help illustrate the importance of your project, as well as help to clarify your project’s scope.
Some examples of appropriate projects are:
•Community-based intervention to address teen pregnancy among Native Americans.
•School-based intervention to address adolescent obesity.
•Educational program to help nurses implement IV best practices in the emergency room.
•Policy proposal to remove barriers for government aid recipients to receive breast cancer treatment at a private clinic.
•Training program for new nurses working with the Hmong community.
•Curriculum to educate young Latina women, ages 18–24, about HIV prevention.
•Web site to educate adult patients recently diagnosed with diabetes about proactive self-care.
Instructions
Your problem statement will focus on presenting information related to the problem-intervention-comparison-outcome-time (PICOT) approach to nursing research. You will also present a brief literature review that supports the need you identified in your problem statement and the appropriateness of your broad intervention approach. Provide enough detail so that the faculty member assessing your problem statement will be able to provide substantive feedback that you will be able to incorporate into the other project components in this course, as well as the final draft of your project. At minimum, be sure to address the bullet points below, as they correspond to the grading criteria. You may also want to read the scoring guide and the Guiding Questions: Problem Statement (PICOT) document (both linked in the Resources) to better understand how each criterion will be assessed.
Part 1: Problem Statement (2–3 pages)
Need Statement (1 paragraph).
•Analyze a health promotion, quality improvement, prevention, education, or management need.
Population and Setting (1–2 paragraphs).
•Describe a target population and setting in which an identified need will be addressed.
Intervention Overview (1–2 paragraphs).
•Explain an overview of one or more interventions that would help address an identified need within a target population and setting.
Comparison of Approaches (1 or 2 paragraphs).
•Analyze potential interprofessional alternatives to an initial intervention overview with regard to their possibilities to meet the needs of the project, population, and setting.
Initial Outcome Draft (1 paragraph).
•Define an outcome that identifies the purpose and intended accomplishments of an intervention for a health promotion, quality improvement, prevention, education, or management need.
Time Estimate (1 paragraph).
•Propose a rough time frame for the development and implementation of an intervention to address an identified need.
Part 2: Literature Review (10–15 resources, 3 pages).
•Analyze current evidence to validate an identified need and its appropriateness within the target population and setting.
•Evaluate and synthesize resources from diverse sources illustrating existing health policy that could impact the approach taken to address an identified need.
