NR-447 Collaborative Healthcare — Nursing Care Models Paper

Course: NR-447: RN Collaborative Healthcare
Module: Week 4
Assignment type: Scholarly paper with observational analysis
Point value: 200 points
Submission: Week 4 Dropbox, APA 7th edition, CCN template
Length: 5–7 pages excluding title page and references
Peer-reviewed sources required: Four scholarly resources, not counting the course text
Observation component: Required; you must observe staff delivery of nursing care in a clinical or practice setting before drafting.

Context

NR-447 examines the structural and leadership conditions that shape how nursing care reaches patients. The Nursing Care Models Paper asks you to connect what you see at the bedside, in a unit, or in a clinic to the formal literature on care delivery models, delegation, and interprofessional communication. Chamberlain’s RN-to-BSN curriculum positions this paper at the transition point between clinical practice and baccalaureate leadership, which is why the rubric rewards direct observation and evidence-based comparison rather than abstract description.

The assignment carries 200 points, weighted as follows: 60 points for identifying the observed model with specific observational detail, 40 points for scholarly resource integration, 60 points for implementation analysis and recommendations, 20 points for conclusion and summary, and 20 points for clarity, APA formatting, and writing conventions. Public reproductions of the Chamberlain NR447 guidelines show the same weighting across the 2016, 2023, and 2025–2026 course cycles, confirming this is a stable assessment architecture rather than a one-off section variation.

Task

Write a 5–7 page paper that identifies, explains, and evaluates a nursing care delivery model observed in a real practice setting. Compare that model with an alternative model, then recommend a different model that could improve quality, safety, and staff satisfaction. Support every major claim with peer-reviewed evidence and structure the paper with APA-formatted headings.

Requirements and Instruction

1. Observe care delivery before writing. Spend time in a clinical or practice setting observing who does what, when, how tasks are assigned, and how communication flows across the care team. Do not write from memory or from a textbook description. The rubric rewards concrete observational language: “the charge nurse assigned the three admissions to the primary nurse, who then delegated vital signs and intake-output measurement to the assistive personnel,” not “the unit uses a care model.”

2. Identify the observed model explicitly. Name the model you saw. Total patient care, primary nursing, team nursing, functional nursing, and case management are the models covered in Finkelman’s leadership text. State the observational evidence that led you to that identification. If the unit blends two models, say which elements of each were present and why the blend matters for delegation and accountability.

3. Summarize two peer-reviewed sources on the observed model. One of these may be the course text. The other must be an independent journal article, systematic review, or scholarly book chapter published within the last five years. Summarize the source’s argument, not just its topic. A sentence such as “Jones and colleagues found that primary nursing improved nurse-reported care continuity but increased overtime during high-acuity admissions” does more rubric work than “Jones discussed primary nursing.”

4. Summarize two peer-reviewed sources on a different model. The alternative model must be a genuinely different delivery structure, not a renamed version of the observed model. If you observed team nursing, primary nursing or total patient care is an appropriate comparison. If you observed primary nursing, functional nursing or case management is appropriate. Use the same standard of summary depth as in Requirement 3.

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5. Analyze implementation of the observed model. This is the 60-point implementation section and the place where most papers lose rubric marks. Describe how the model actually operates on the unit: how assignments are made, how the charge nurse allocates acuity, where handoff communication breaks down, which tasks are delegated to assistive personnel, and how the interprofessional team receives nursing input. Connect each observation to the literature you summarized. The analysis should show a clear relationship among the care model, delegation practice, and patient-safety outcomes.

6. Recommend a different model with a defensible rationale. State the recommended model, then explain what would change if the unit adopted it. Address at least three of the following: communication pathways, patient-safety reporting, interprofessional workflow, delegation scope, staff satisfaction, and continuity of care across shifts. Ground the recommendation in the literature, not in personal preference. A recommendation that ignores the unit’s staffing ratio, skill mix, or patient acuity is a weak recommendation.

7. Use APA 7th edition headings and formatting. The CCN template is required. Include a title page, introduction with a clear purpose statement, body sections aligned to the assignment criteria, and a conclusion. The reference page must include every citation used in the paper and nothing that was not cited.

8. Submit to the Week 4 Dropbox. Late submissions follow the Chamberlain Late Assignment Policy. Submit the paper as a Word document, not a PDF, unless your section instructor states otherwise.

Grading Rubric

Sample Answer Excerpt

The following excerpt illustrates the level of observation detail and literature integration the rubric rewards in the identification and implementation sections.

The medical-surgical unit I observed used a team-nursing structure with a charge nurse, three RNs, and two assistive personnel across a 24-bed assignment. The charge nurse made assignments by room number rather than by acuity, and the assistive personnel rotated between RN teams every four hours. That rotation disrupted the continuity that team nursing depends on, because the assistive personnel had to relearn each patient’s mobility status and intake-output pattern twice per shift. A 2024 systematic review of hospital care delivery models found that inconsistent team composition was associated with lower nurse-reported care quality and weaker patient-satisfaction signals, even when staffing ratios remained unchanged (Geltmeyer et al., 2024). The delegation pattern I observed fits that finding: the RNs delegated vital signs and ambulation consistently, but delegated blood-glucose checks only to the assistive personnel who had completed the unit’s competency validation, which created uneven task ownership across the two teams. The model was formally team nursing, yet the rotating assistive-personnel assignment turned it into a hybrid that functioned more like functional nursing during the middle four hours of each shift.

The excerpt does three things the rubric rewards. It names the observed model and shows the observational evidence that complicates that name. It brings in a current peer-reviewed systematic review and uses the source to interpret the observation, not to decorate it. It keeps the delegation language concrete, which matters because Chamberlain’s 2025–2026 clinical-course revisions consistently foreground delegation scope and interprofessional workflow as rubric-visible constructs. Students who write “the unit uses team nursing” without the delegation detail lose points in the 60-point implementation section, even when the model identification is correct.

Extending the Analysis with Systematic Review Evidence

Geltmeyer and colleagues reviewed hospital care delivery models and reported mixed evidence across patient and nurse outcomes, with job satisfaction and quality of nursing care appearing most frequently in the nurse-outcome literature and patient satisfaction appearing most often on the patient side (Geltmeyer et al., 2024). That mixed picture matters for this paper because it prevents a simple “model X is better than model Y” argument. A stronger paper acknowledges that the evidence base is heterogeneous, then explains why a particular recommendation still fits the observed unit’s staffing, acuity, and interprofessional context. Readers who search for guidance on this assignment often ask whether one model is universally superior; the literature does not support that claim, and the rubric does not ask for it.

Common Misconception: Observation Is Not a Literature Review

A frequent error in NR-447 papers is substituting a textbook description of a care model for the required observation. Finkelman’s leadership text provides the conceptual vocabulary for the paper, and the 2022/2023 edition remains the standard reference in Chamberlain’s RN-to-BSN sequence (Finkelman, 2023). The observation, however, must come from a practice setting. The rubric’s 60-point identification criterion explicitly asks for “who, what, when, where, and how” detail, which cannot be generated from a textbook alone. A paper that describes primary nursing in the abstract but never states what the charge nurse did at 0715 or how the RN delegated a 0900 medication pass to an LPN will score in the developing range on identification regardless of how polished the literature review is.

Delegation Language That Satisfies the Rubric

Delegation is where the observed model becomes visible in writing. Use language that distinguishes assignment from delegation, and use language that distinguishes RN accountability from assistive-personnel task completion. A sentence such as “the RN delegated the 0800 blood-glucose check to the assistive personnel but retained accountability for interpreting the result and adjusting the insulin sliding scale” demonstrates the distinction. The 2024 systematic review evidence supports the claim that care-delivery structures shape nurse-related outcomes, but the paper’s delegation analysis must come from the observation, not from the review alone (Geltmeyer et al., 2024). The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goal framework, which Chamberlain’s 2025–2026 Fundamentals and Collaborative Healthcare revisions reference consistently, gives the paper a safety anchor without requiring you to add a sixth source. Use it sparingly and only where the observation genuinely raises a safety-reporting or handoff issue.

Conclusion

The NR-447 Nursing Care Models Paper is not a general essay about nursing care. It is an observation-driven comparison with a fixed point structure: identify what you saw, summarize the evidence on that model and a different one, analyze how the observed model actually functions, then recommend a change. The rubric rewards papers that keep the observation visible throughout the analysis rather than front-loading it in the introduction and then drifting into abstraction. Write the observation first, in concrete terms, and let the literature explain what the observation means for delegation, workflow, and patient safety. That sequence satisfies the 60-point implementation criterion and the 40-point source-integration criterion at the same time.

References

Finkelman, A. (2023). *Professional nursing concepts: Competencies for quality leadership* (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Geltmeyer, K., Duprez, V., Blondeel, M., Serraes, B., Malfait, S., & Verhaeghe, S. (2024). The effect of different care delivery models in a hospital setting on patient- and nurse-related outcomes: A systematic review with narrative synthesis. *Journal of Advanced Nursing, 81*(1), 140–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.16271

The Joint Commission. (2025). *National Patient Safety Goals*. https://www.jointcommission.org/standards/national-patient-safety-goals/

Chamberlain University. (2025). *NR-447: RN Collaborative Healthcare course syllabus and assignment guidelines*. Chamberlain University Curriculum and Catalogs.

Geltmeyer, K., Duprez, V., & Verhaeghe, S. (2023). How much do we know about nursing care delivery models in a hospital setting? A mapping review. *Journal of Nursing Management, 2023*, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/6678623