Define a patient, family or population health problem
Define a health problem drawn from your own practice, analyse literature and professional evidence that guides nursing action on it, propose strategies to improve outcomes, and reflect on the state board practice standards that apply, citing at least five sources under five years old.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 13, 2026
From topic to problem statement
The five assessment criteria are the grading rubric, and the first one carries the rest. Defining a problem is not naming a topic. Falls is a topic; unwitnessed falls among patients over seventy-five on a specific unit during night shift, at a rate you can state, is a problem. The difference matters because every later criterion depends on it: literature can only guide nursing action if the action has a target, strategies can only improve outcomes if the outcome is specified, and practice standards only bite when the nursing role in the problem is concrete. The assignment also anchors this in personal practice and asks you to identify your relationship to the individual and how contact was made, using initials only. That instruction is both a privacy control and a signal that the problem must be real and observed, not selected from a list of common nursing issues. Choosing something you have seen also makes the later criteria easier to answer.
The evidence criterion asks for analysis, not a literature summary. Analysing evidence to guide nursing actions means saying what each source establishes, how strong that finding is, and what it implies you should do differently — and being honest where sources conflict or where the evidence base is thin for your specific population. Five sources under five years old is a floor, and recency is checked. The final criterion, reflecting on state board practice standards, is the one most often answered generically. It asks about your board, in your state, and what its practice act and scope provisions permit or require of you in this specific problem. Cite the board's own material rather than describing nursing regulation in general terms. Practice acts differ between states on delegation, supervision and scope, so a generic answer is not merely thin — it may be wrong for your jurisdiction. The final criterion, professional APA writing, is scored in its own right.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Convert a broad clinical topic into a specific, measurable problem statement.
- 02Analyse literature and professional evidence for what it implies about nursing action.
- 03Propose outcome-directed strategies tied to the defined problem.
- 04Relate a specific state board's practice standards to a chosen clinical problem.
- 05Protect patient privacy using initials and a stated relationship and contact route.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A defined patient, family or population health problem relevant to personal practice.
- 02An analysis of literature and professional evidence guiding nursing actions on that problem.
- 03Proposed strategies to improve patient or population outcomes.
- 04A reflection on the relevant state board nursing practice standards.
- 05Your relationship to the individual and the contact route, with initials only.
- 06At least five scholarly or professional sources no more than five years old, in APA style.
Define, evidence, strategies, standards
The problem, defined
Population, setting, measure and why it matters in this practice.
Relationship, contact and privacy
How the individual was identified and reached, with initials only.
Evidence analysis
What the literature establishes, how strongly, and what it implies for nursing action.
Proposed strategies
Actions directed at the named outcome, with the evidence that supports each.
State board practice standards
What your board's practice act and scope provisions require of you in this problem.
Professional communication
Organisation, grammar and APA style as a graded criterion in its own right.
Evidence that guides action, and your own board
Recommended databases
- CINAHL
- PubMed
- AHRQ
- Your state board of nursing
- NCSBN
- American Nurses Association
Search sequence
- 1.Write the problem statement first, then search using its population and outcome terms.
- 2.Search CINAHL and PubMed limited to the last five years for interventions targeting that outcome.
- 3.Check AHRQ patient safety resources for measurement definitions and improvement tools.
- 4.Locate your own state board's nurse practice act and scope of practice provisions.
- 5.Read the ANA scope and standards for the professional standard that applies to the nursing action proposed.
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
Patient Safety and Quality Improvement
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality · 2025
Measurement definitions and improvement strategies for the kinds of problem this assessment targets.
- 02
Nursing Scope and Standards of Practice
American Nurses Association · 2021
The professional standards against which the proposed nursing actions are judged.
- 03
Practice
National Council of State Boards of Nursing · 2025
The route to your own state's nurse practice act, which the reflection criterion requires.
- 04
Healthy People 2030
Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion · 2025
National objectives and baseline data, useful where the problem is defined at population level.
- 05
Social determinants of health
World Health Organization · 2025
Framing for population-level problems where the drivers sit outside the clinical encounter.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Naming a topic rather than defining a problem with a population, setting and measure.
- Summarising the literature instead of analysing what it implies for nursing action.
- Proposing strategies that do not connect to the outcome the problem statement named.
- Describing nursing regulation generally instead of a named state board's standards.
- Using the individual's full name rather than initials, or omitting the relationship and contact route.
- Citing sources older than five years against an explicit recency requirement.
Submission checklist
- The problem statement names the population, the setting and how the problem is measured.
- Each cited source is analysed for what it means for practice, not just described.
- Strategies are tied to the stated outcome.
- A named state board's practice standards are discussed, with a citation.
- The individual appears by initials only, with the relationship and contact route stated.
- At least five sources, all within five years, formatted in APA style.
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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.