DNP 825 Epidemiology Paper Part Two: analysis guide
Three components are named and the third is the one that gets skipped. The obstacles section is not a caveat paragraph — it is a third of the assignment and the part that shows you have thought about implementation.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 15, 2026
An at-risk population, and what makes it at risk
Part two moves from description to application, and the brief names three components that each need to be visibly present. An at-risk population must be identified, which means specified narrowly enough to act on — not adults with diabetes but adults with type 2 diabetes discharged from your service without a scheduled follow-up. How nursing science can affect that population's health risk is the second, and it wants a mechanism rather than an aspiration: which intervention, delivered by whom, altering which measurable outcome. The third component is the obstacles that would hinder prevention and health promotion for that population, and it is the one most responses reduce to a sentence about funding. Treat it as a third of the paper, because that is how it is weighted. One practical test: if you cannot say roughly how many people are in your population at your own site, it is not yet bounded. A number forces the inclusion criteria to be fixed.
The link back to part one is what makes this an epidemiology paper rather than a general quality-improvement essay. Your at-risk population should fall out of the distribution you described — if part one showed the condition concentrating in one age band or one county, that is where part two goes. Naming a population part one never mentioned makes the sequence read as three unrelated papers. On obstacles, the useful ones are specific and documented: a screening interval no one has time to honour, a referral that requires transport the population does not have, health literacy demands the material does not meet, a reimbursement rule that pays for the treatment but not the prevention. Cite at least one of them rather than asserting all of them. An obstacle with evidence behind it is an analysis; an obstacle without evidence is a guess dressed as caution.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Define an at-risk population narrowly enough to target an intervention at it.
- 02Specify a mechanism by which nursing science changes a measurable health risk.
- 03Identify implementation obstacles that are documented rather than assumed.
- 04Carry the analysis forward from a descriptive distribution rather than starting again.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A precisely bounded at-risk population, connected to part one's distribution.
- 02A named nursing intervention with the outcome it is expected to move.
- 03Obstacles to prevention and promotion, treated as a substantial section.
- 04Evidence supporting at least the principal obstacle.
- 05An explicit statement of how part two builds on part one.
Population, mechanism, obstacles
The at-risk population
Identify and bound the population, showing how it emerges from part one.
Why this population carries the risk
Set out the exposures or determinants that concentrate risk here.
How nursing science changes the risk
Name the intervention, its delivery, and the outcome it targets.
Obstacles to prevention and promotion
Set out the barriers that would hinder implementation for this population.
What part three will need
State what remains to be evaluated once the intervention is proposed.
Evidence for the barrier, not just for the problem
Recommended databases
- CINAHL
- PubMed Central
- Healthy People 2030
- County Health Rankings
Search sequence
- 1.Search your condition with barriers OR facilitators to find documented implementation obstacles.
- 2.Check Healthy People 2030 for an objective covering your population, which gives a national benchmark.
- 3.Find one intervention study reporting an outcome measure you could reuse.
- 4.Look for a social-determinants source explaining why risk concentrates in your population.
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
Leading Health Indicators - Healthy People 2030
Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services · 2024
National objectives with measurable targets, which give the at-risk population a benchmark rather than a description.
- 02
Social Determinants of Health - Healthy People 2030
Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion · 2025
The determinants framework that explains why risk concentrates in particular populations, which is what the second component has to argue.
- 03
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation · 2025
County-level data for locating an at-risk population geographically and defending the boundary you draw around it.
- 04
Implementation strategies for large scale quality improvement initiatives in primary care settings: a qualitative assessment
BMC Primary Care · 2023
An implementation study reporting what actually obstructed a primary-care improvement effort, which is the evidence the obstacles section usually lacks.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Reducing the obstacles component to one sentence about lack of funding.
- Defining the at-risk population so broadly that no intervention could target it.
- Switching to a population part one never described, breaking the sequence.
- Describing an intervention without naming what it is supposed to change.
- Asserting barriers from experience with nothing cited to support them.
Submission checklist
- Are all three named components visibly present and separately developed?
- Could someone act on your population definition as written?
- Does the obstacles section carry citations, not just conviction?
- Does the population follow from part one's distribution?
- Have you stated the outcome the intervention is meant to move?
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
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.