NURS 6341 Week 2 Topic Proposal Example

Course	NURS 6341 Specialty in Clinical Nursing
Week	Week 2
Paper type	Topic proposal
Length	About 550 words, 4 pages
Format	APA 7 student paper
School	Walden University
Program	Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)
Updated	October 2026

Free sample paper for NURS 6341 Week 2

Topic Proposal: Nurse-Delivered Delirium Prevention After Hip Fracture Surgery in Older Adults

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 6341: Specialty in Clinical Nursing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What this page is doingThe title carries the population, the intervention and who delivers it, the three terms the rest of the term must hold fixed.

Topic Proposal: Nurse-Delivered Delirium Prevention After Hip Fracture Surgery in Older Adults

Question

Among adults aged 65 and older admitted to an orthopedic unit for surgical repair of a hip fracture (population and setting), does a multicomponent nonpharmacologic delirium prevention protocol delivered by nursing staff (intervention), compared with usual nursing care (comparison), reduce the incidence of delirium detected by the Confusion Assessment Method during the hospital stay (outcome)?

Boundaries

Five exclusions keep the question answerable in one term. Elective hip and knee replacement is excluded because those patients can be prepared weeks in advance, while hip fracture patients arrive in pain and the protocol must start in the emergency department. Intensive care patients are excluded because their delirium risks and assessment tools differ. Drug prophylaxis, including sedatives given to prevent delirium, and anesthetic technique are excluded because they are prescribed by physicians and anesthesiologists, not delivered by nurses. Treatment of delirium once it has begun is excluded, since prevention and management are distinct questions with distinct evidence. And long-term cognition after discharge is excluded as an outcome, because it cannot be measured on my unit and the trials measuring it report mixed results.

One decision remains open and will be settled by week 4: whether studies in which a geriatrician or geriatric team directed the protocol, with nurses delivering it, count as nurse-delivered. I expect to include them and analyze them separately.

Feasibility: A Preliminary Search

I ran a preliminary PubMed search on September 29, 2026, combining subject headings and free-text terms for four concepts. Hip fracture terms alone returned 45,192 records, and delirium terms 31,186. Their combination returned 1,247. Adding prevention and multicomponent intervention terms reduced this to 293, and adding a randomized or quasi-experimental design filter reduced it to 68. Adding nursing terms to that set returned only 8. That last figure is the honest one: trials that describe their intervention as nursing are few, though many trials of geriatric teams relied on nurses to deliver the elements. A recent systematic review of nurse-led interventions to prevent postoperative delirium in older orthopedic patients found only eight eligible studies, two of them randomized (Kraonual et al., 2026). The evidence base exists but is thin for the nursing-specific question, and the synthesis will need to draw on broader multicomponent trials, such as the 14 compared with usual care in a Cochrane review (Burton et al., 2021), while stating which ones nurses delivered. CINAHL and Embase will be searched in week 3.

Significance

The specialty's guideline for postoperative delirium calls for several nondrug preventive measures at once, carried out by a team drawn from more than one discipline, whenever an older surgical patient is at risk (American Geriatrics Society Expert Panel on Postoperative Delirium in Older Adults [AGS Expert Panel], 2015). In many community hospitals, mine included, orthopedic patients are never seen by a geriatrician, and the only team present around the clock is nursing. Whether the recommendation can be met by nurses alone is a gap between the specialty's standard and the settings where most older adults with hip fractures are treated.

Product

The term will produce a search record, an annotated bibliography of 10 to 15 sources, an evidence synthesis of about 12 pages, and a unit protocol with an evaluation plan, each built on this question.

References

American Geriatrics Society Expert Panel on Postoperative Delirium in Older Adults. (2015). American Geriatrics Society abstracted clinical practice guideline for postoperative delirium in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 63(1), 142-150. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.13281

Burton, J. K., Craig, L., Yong, S. Q., Siddiqi, N., Teale, E. A., Woodhouse, R., Barugh, A. J., Shepherd, A. M., Brunton, A., Freeman, S. C., Sutton, A. J., & Quinn, T. J. (2021). Non-pharmacological interventions for preventing delirium in hospitalised non-ICU patients. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2021(11), Article CD013307. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD013307.pub3

Kraonual, S., Thongpeth, W., & Thongpet, T. (2026). The effectiveness of nursing interventions for preventing postoperative delirium in older adults undergoing major orthopedic surgery: A systematic review. BMC Nursing, 25, Article 676. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-04821-7

What the NURS 6341 Week 2 instructions ask for

Week 2 of NURS 6341 has students propose the topic they will study all term. State a focused question, set boundaries, show a preliminary search, explain significance and name the final product. Specificity makes a proposal approvable, so a broad topic invites revision requests. Cite sources for significance and the preliminary search in APA 7. If your instructor asks for changes, narrow rather than replace the topic. One to two pages is typical. Label each part of the question so the reviewer sees its structure. A preliminary search with numbers shows the topic is feasible. A clear layout follows the paper's order: question, boundaries, feasibility, significance and product. Each section can be a short paragraph, and the preliminary search can be a small table of databases and hit counts.

Inside the NURS 6341 Week 2 example

The proposal is short and load bearing. The question appears at the top in one sentence, with population, setting and outcome all named inside it, so nothing has to be inferred later. A boundaries paragraph follows and does the unusual work of listing exclusions: the adjacent populations left out, the settings not covered, the outcome the writer will not attempt to measure, each with a reason attached. Feasibility comes next as a preliminary count of what a database search returns, reported honestly rather than hopefully. A paragraph on significance ties the question to a standard or a guidance gap inside the specialty. The closing lines name the deliverable the term will produce and roughly how long it will run.

Reading the NURS 6341 Week 2 rubric

A proposal earns its marks when an instructor could approve it unchanged, and only specificity makes that possible. The example gives an instructor a question to accept or amend in one line, then removes the ambiguity that usually forces a second round of revision. Feasibility carries a row in many sections, and reporting a thin yield honestly earns more than claiming abundant literature a grader can disprove in a minute. The familiar losses: a question that is really a topic, a scope section listing inclusions only, significance argued from general appeal rather than from the field's own gaps, and a proposal that never says what will be handed in at the end. Missing citations cost their own row.

NURS 6341 Week 2 help: mistakes that cost marks

Topic proposals score poorly when the question is broad. Name the population, intervention, comparison and outcome. A second weakness is no feasibility check. Run a quick search and report the yield. Writers also skip boundaries. Say what is excluded, such as delirium treatment. Avoid promising a product larger than one term allows. Keep it realistic. A boundary such as excluding patients already delirious on admission shows careful scoping. Close with the product you will deliver. Check that the product can be finished within the term. State the outcome measure in the question itself.

Get a NURS 6341 Week 2 example written to your instructions

Send the prompt, your section's rubric and the specialty question you have in mind, and the desk writes the proposal around yours, boundaries and feasibility included. The first custom sample costs nothing and returns inside 24-48 hours, close enough to submission form that an instructor can approve or amend it directly.

More NURS 6341 papers and MSN samples

NURS 6341 Week 2 questions, answered

What if my instructor rejects the topic?

That is what a proposal is for, and a rejection usually names its reason. Send the response along with the original prompt and a revised version is written to it, whether the fix is a narrower population, a different setting or an outcome the literature can actually support. The revision belongs to the same request.

How long is a topic proposal?

Short in most sections, often a page or two, though no length here is official and your prompt rules. Length is rarely what fails one. The example stays compact because everything inside it is load bearing, and padding a proposal only makes the scope harder for an instructor to see and judge.

Does the proposal need its own references?

Usually a handful, enough to show the question is live and the literature exists. The example cites one standard from the specialty and two studies turned up in the preliminary search. A proposal with no citations is asking for approval on assertion alone, which most rubrics in this course mark down.

Where can I find a free NURS 6341 Week 2 sample paper?

The delirium prevention topic proposal is on this page with the labeled question, boundaries, the preliminary search, significance and the product.

What does the NURS 6341 Week 2 proposal leave out?

Topics such as delirium treatment and patients already delirious on admission, so the question stays on prevention after hip fracture surgery.