NURS 8003 Week 9 development plan example

Goals Someone Else Could Check: A Doctoral Development Plan for Scholarship and Systems-Based Practice

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8003: Foundations and Essentials in Nursing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Goals Someone Else Could Check: A Doctoral Development Plan for Scholarship and Systems-Based Practice

What the Self-Assessment Found

My self-assessment earlier in the course rated me, a composite nurse manager of a 30-bed medical unit, on five of the ten Essentials domains published in 2021 (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2021). Two ratings were low. In scholarship for the nursing discipline, I had no evidence of independently appraising a body of literature or leading an evidence-based change. In systems-based practice, I had managed problems on my unit but never analyzed or redesigned a process that crossed departments. This plan turns those two gaps into four goals, each with dated activities, a defined product and a stated way of confirming that the goal was achieved.

How the Goals Were Written

The goals follow the SMART convention, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, which is widely used in health care goal setting because it forces a goal to name what will be done, by when and how success will be known (Bovend'Eerdt et al., 2009). I added one requirement of my own: each goal must end in a product that exists outside my head, such as a document, a presentation or a data display, so that my instructor or my manager could look at it and judge whether I met the goal. Goals such as "improve my understanding of research" fail that test, because only I could say whether they were met.

The Plan

Table 1 sets out the four goals.

Table 1

Development Goals, Activities and Evidence

Why These Goals

The four goals are linked on purpose. Goals 1 and 2 build scholarship on a question my unit actually faces, delayed discharges, so the evidence I appraise will be used rather than filed. Goals 3 and 4 build systems-based practice on the same problem, so the map is informed by the evidence and the proposal draws on both. Working one problem through both domains is more realistic than four unrelated goals and gives me a single body of work that could become a DNP project.

Two of the activities use coursework the program already requires. That is deliberate, not a shortcut. Required appraisal assignments are the natural place to build appraisal skill; the plan adds what the coursework does not, applying the skill to my own unit's question and exposing the result to a clinical audience. Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt (2023) describe the steps of evidence-based practice as running from asking a question through appraisal to implementation and evaluation, and the plan carries me further along that sequence than coursework alone would.

Anticipated Barriers

Time is the largest barrier. As a unit manager, I rarely have protected hours, and Goals 3 and 4 require meetings with directors whose schedules are full. I will ask my director for four hours a month of protected time for the plan, framed as development that benefits the hospital's discharge performance. The second barrier is access: the directors of case management and pharmacy have no obligation to help me. I will approach them with the problem, not with a finished solution, and ask for their help mapping their part of it. The third barrier is my own habit of fixing problems quickly rather than analyzing them, which the self-assessment identified; the plan's product requirement is partly a guard against that habit.

Deliberate Omissions

Three domains I rated as developing or established get no goals here. That is a choice, not an oversight. A plan with goals in every domain would spread limited time thin and produce partial evidence everywhere. Concentrating on the two weakest domains, and on one problem that runs through both, gives the best chance of moving the ratings that matter most for doctoral practice. The other domains will develop through ordinary coursework and my current role, and the repeat self-assessment will show whether they have.

The plan also does not promise that the patient flow committee will adopt my proposal. Goal 4 is achieved when the proposal is presented and a decision recorded, whatever the decision is. Tying a development goal to someone else's approval would make my learning depend on factors I cannot control; tying it to a presented, evidence-based proposal keeps the goal about my own growth.

Review Points

Progress checks are set for every term's close, with my faculty advisor, and every second month, with my director. If a target date slips by more than a month, I will revise the plan rather than let the goal drift, recording the reason. Twelve months from now I will repeat the self-assessment on the same five domains and compare the evidence column with this year's. The domains of scholarship and systems-based practice should move from beginning to developing, and the evidence to support that change should be the four products in Table 1.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The Essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education.

Bovend'Eerdt, T. J. H., Botell, R. E., & Wade, D. T. (2009). Writing SMART rehabilitation goals and achieving goal attainment scaling: A practical guide. Clinical Rehabilitation, 23(4), 352-361. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269215508101741

Melnyk, B. M., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (2023). Evidence-based practice in nursing and healthcare: A guide to best practice (5th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.