Community setting and CHN roles: home health nursing paper
A four-page APA paper on the community health nursing role of home health nursing: introduce the role and your community, describe the practice setting and three health services provided, detail a health promotion intervention supported by a peer-reviewed article, and profile a professional nursing organisation and one issue it is addressing.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 12, 2026
Why does the brief exclude hospice twice?
The role is assigned, not chosen, and the brief says so twice: home health nursing, explicitly not hospice. That repetition is a warning, because the two overlap in practice and the literature runs them together constantly. A peer-reviewed article about end-of-life care in the home will feel perfectly on topic and will be marked as off it. Home health nursing is intermittent skilled nursing care delivered to patients in their residence with a restorative or maintenance goal — wound care, infusion, post-surgical recovery, chronic disease management, medication management — under a plan of care with an expectation of improvement or stability. Hospice is comfort-focused care with a prognosis criterion. Check the setting and the goal of care in every source before you cite it, because a paper built on hospice evidence will describe the wrong practice confidently and consistently, which is harder for a marker to forgive than a thin one.
The paper's structure is prescribed by an APA template, and the headings are the sections you will be graded against, so the useful question is what each one wants that the others do not. The community setting section asks for the setting, the populations served and three health services — three, counted, not "a range of services". The health promotion section asks for something different from care delivery: an intervention aimed at preventing deterioration or improving health, not a description of the nursing visit itself. That distinction is where papers blur. Wound care is a service; a fall-risk assessment with home modification teaching is a health promotion intervention. The collaboration list in that same section is another countable item — people, organisations and community members the nurse works with — and it is easy to write past on the way to the next heading. Name them.
The professional organisation section has a trap the brief anticipates. It tells you that if you cannot find an organisation specific to the role, search the American Nurses Association site. Home health nursing does have its own bodies, so you should not need the fallback, and using it when a specific organisation exists reads as insufficient searching. Then note the second half of the requirement: one professional issue the organisation is currently addressing, related to this setting. Not the organisation's mission, not its history — a live issue, which for home health has in recent years meant reimbursement models, staffing supply, telehealth scope and patient safety in an environment the nurse does not control. Cite the organisation in text and on the reference page; the brief points out that a bare URL is not a reference, which is a specific thing it has evidently had to say before.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Distinguish home health nursing from hospice in scope, goal and eligibility.
- 02Separate a health service from a health promotion intervention.
- 03Profile a professional organisation by a current issue rather than by its mission statement.
- 04Screen a peer-reviewed article for setting match before citing it.
- 05Write to a prescribed template where the headings are the grading criteria.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01An APA paper of no more than four pages, excluding title page and reference list, using the provided template.
- 02Introduction: the role, a community setting, how the role is used in your community, populations served, and a purpose statement.
- 03Community setting: the practice setting, populations served, and three health services provided by the role.
- 04Health promotion nursing intervention: detailed interventions, the people and organisations collaborated with, and one peer-reviewed journal article.
- 05Professional nursing organisation: a detailed description in your own words, plus one professional issue it is addressing.
- 06Summary paragraph and a reference page starting on a new page.
- 07At least one scholarly peer-reviewed article not assigned in the course, less than ten years old.
Five template sections, and what each one counts
Introduction
Introduce home health nursing, the setting, how the role appears in your community, the populations it serves, and the paper's purpose.
The practice setting
Describe the patient's residence as a practice environment and the populations home health serves there.
Three health services
Name and describe exactly three services a home health nurse provides in that setting.
Health promotion intervention
Detail an intervention aimed at preventing deterioration, supported by the peer-reviewed article, and name the collaborators.
The professional organisation
Describe a home health nursing organisation in your own words and identify one issue it is currently addressing.
Summary and references
Reiterate role and setting, intervention and organisation, then close; start the reference page on a new page.
Which professional bodies actually speak for home health nursing
Recommended databases
- Chamberlain library (CINAHL, MEDLINE)
- PubMed
- American Nurses Association
- CMS
Search sequence
- 1.Add a term that excludes hospice from every search, or you will spend the paper filtering results by hand.
- 2.Search for home health specific professional organisations before defaulting to the ANA.
- 3.Look at the organisation's current position statements or advocacy page to find a live issue.
- 4.Screen each candidate article by setting and goal before reading it in full.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Advanced Practice Registered Nurse Roles
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
Role definitions and scope boundaries, useful for stating precisely what home health nursing is and is not.
- 02
Code of Ethics for Nurses
American Nurses Association · 2025
The ANA's current professional framework, and the starting point if you use the fallback the brief permits — though a home health specific body is the stronger choice.
- 03
Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · 2025
The policy pressure that funds much of home health's growth, which is one of the live professional issues the organisation section can draw on.
- 04
Re-Engineered Discharge (RED) Toolkit
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality · 2024
A specified transitional intervention that home health nurses deliver, giving the health promotion section something concrete and evidenced to describe.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Citing hospice literature, which the brief excludes twice and which dominates search results for home-based nursing.
- Listing services vaguely instead of naming three, which is the number the brief specifies.
- Describing a nursing visit as a health promotion intervention when it is care delivery.
- Falling back to the ANA when a home health specific organisation exists.
- Describing the organisation's mission instead of a current professional issue it is addressing.
- Using a URL alone as a reference, which the brief states is not adequate.
- Ignoring the template headings and writing continuous prose.
Submission checklist
- Every source describes home health, not hospice.
- Exactly three health services are named in the community setting section.
- The health promotion intervention is preventive or restorative, not a description of routine care.
- Collaborating people and organisations are named.
- The peer-reviewed article is less than ten years old and was not assigned in the course.
- The professional organisation is specific to home health where one exists.
- One current professional issue is named, and it relates to this setting.
- The organisation is cited in text and fully referenced, not by URL alone.
- Four pages or fewer, excluding title page and references, using the template.
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Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.