| Course | NURS 8546 Strategies for Innovation in Nursing Education |
|---|---|
| Week | Week 2 |
| Paper type | Program needs assessment paper |
| Length | About 1,000 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Walden University |
| Program | Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NURS 8546 Week 2
Capacity, Footprint and Placements Before Any Remedy: A Needs Assessment of a Two-Hundred-Learner Prelicensure Program
Student Name
College of Nursing, Walden University
NURS 8546: Strategies for Innovation in Nursing Education
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Capacity, Footprint and Placements Before Any Remedy: A Needs Assessment of a Two-Hundred-Learner Prelicensure Program
Purpose and Scope
A needs assessment establishes the distance between what is and what should be before anyone proposes how to close it (Altschuld & Watkins, 2014). This one describes the current state of a described associate degree nursing program enrolling about 200 learners across four semesters, in three areas: faculty teaching capacity, the delivery footprint of its courses and its clinical placement supply. It is written as an inventory. It reports what the program has and what it has already committed to, and it names four gaps between the two. It proposes no remedy, because a remedy chosen before the gaps are measured tends to fit the problem someone expected rather than the one that exists.
Sources were the faculty roster and load reports for the last two academic years, the course schedule, the learning management system's course settings, clinical affiliation agreements and placement rosters for the last four terms.
Faculty Teaching Capacity
The program has 23 faculty: 9 full-time tenured or tenure-track, 4 full-time on annual contracts and 10 part-time adjuncts. Teaching load is reported here in sections rather than in hours, because sections are what the program schedules and what a dean approves. A full-time load is three sections per semester, with a clinical group counting as one section; adjuncts are limited by college policy to two.
At full load, the 13 full-time faculty can teach 39 sections a semester and the adjuncts 20, for a maximum of 59. The current schedule requires 62 sections each semester: 36 didactic or laboratory sections and 26 clinical groups. The program closes that gap through overload assignments. In the last two years, 8 of the 13 full-time faculty carried at least one overload section every semester, and two carried two. Clinical groups account for most of the demand, since each group of eight learners requires one faculty member for the whole clinical day.
Two further constraints emerged. Four of the nine tenured faculty could retire within the next three years. And only five faculty hold the specialty background the state board requires for the mental health and maternal-child clinical courses, which means those courses depend on a small number of people.
Clinical groups are also limited by ratio. The state board caps clinical groups at eight learners per faculty member, and two partner hospitals cap them at six on their busiest units. Because of those caps, a cohort of 50 learners in one clinical course needs seven to nine faculty on its clinical days, not six. The section count therefore understates how many people the program needs on a given day, which matters most on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when three clinical courses run at once and every full-time faculty member with clinical credentials is already assigned.
Delivery Footprint
Each of the program's 16 nursing courses was classified by how it is actually delivered this year, based on its schedule and learning management system settings rather than its catalog description. Four didactic courses run fully online. Six require campus attendance for all sessions, including the two skills laboratory courses and the four clinical courses' seminars. The remaining six are hybrid, with weekly online modules and campus sessions every other week.
The hybrid group is notable because no one decided it. During the pandemic, these six courses moved online and returned partly to campus afterward, each on its own terms. Their catalog descriptions still describe campus delivery. Three of the six have different campus schedules from section to section of the same course, so learners in different sections attend campus on different weeks. The program has a hybrid footprint without a hybrid design.
Placement Supply
Clinical placements were counted by site, specialty and term for the last four terms. The program holds affiliation agreements with eleven sites. Medical-surgical placements come from four hospitals, which together provided 12 clinical groups a term until the spring, when the largest hospital closed two units and its capacity fell from six groups to three. Mental health placements come from two sites, providing three groups a term. Maternal-child placements come from two hospitals, providing three groups.
Two sites depend on a single preceptor. At one mental health site, all three groups are hosted by one unit manager who arranged them personally; at one maternal-child hospital, a single nurse educator coordinates both of its groups. If either person leaves, those placements are at risk. Regulatory guidance for nursing programs treats adequate and stable clinical resources as a marker of program quality (Spector et al., 2020), and these two sites are neither adequate nor stable in that sense.
Four Gaps
Each gap is stated as the distance between what the program offers and what it has already committed to.
Gap 1: Faculty capacity. The program has committed to 62 sections a semester and can staff 59 without overload. The gap of three sections is small on paper but is closed every semester by overload that affects most full-time faculty.
Gap 2: Medical-surgical placements. The program admits learners for 12 medical-surgical clinical groups a term and now has 9.
Gap 3: Delivery design. The catalog commits to campus delivery in six courses that are in fact hybrid, without a shared design or schedule.
Gap 4: Placement resilience. Five of the 18 clinical groups in the three specialty areas depend on two individuals at partner sites.
What Could Not Be Established
Two things could not be measured from available records. First, the actual hours faculty spend on clinical preparation and grading were not recorded, so the load figures understate the real workload, particularly for clinical faculty. Second, the program could not establish how many additional placements its remaining partners could host, because partners would not commit to figures without a formal request. Both should be measured before any remedy is proposed. Curriculum texts recommend that needs assessments state the limits of their data as clearly as their findings, because decisions made later will rest on both (Iwasiw et al., 2020).
References
Altschuld, J. W., & Watkins, R. (2014). A primer on needs assessment: More than 40 years of research and practice. New Directions for Evaluation, 2014(144), 5-18. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.20099
Iwasiw, C. L., Andrusyszyn, M.-A., & Goldenberg, D. (2020). Curriculum development in nursing education (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Spector, N., Silvestre, J., Alexander, M., Martin, B., Hooper, J. I., Squires, A., & Ojemeni, M. (2020). NCSBN regulatory guidelines and evidence-based quality indicators for nursing education programs. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 11(2 Suppl.), S1-S64. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2155-8256(20)30075-2
NURS 8546 Week 2 instructions, in plain terms
Expect this paper to describe a program's current state in numbers and documents, without proposing a solution. Several pages are typical. Choose a small number of areas that matter for the changes the course will later consider, such as faculty capacity, how courses are delivered and clinical placements. Report each area in units the program actually uses, for example sections rather than hours. Base the inventory on documents like rosters, schedules and agreements rather than impressions. State the gaps as the difference between what the program offers and what it has already committed to. Close with what the evidence could not establish, since later decisions will rely on those limits as much as on the findings, and keep any remedy out of the paper.
Inside the NURS 8546 Week 2 example
An opening section defines a needs assessment with Altschuld and Watkins, sets the scope and lists the documents reviewed. The capacity section reports 23 faculty by appointment type, shows the section arithmetic and adds a paragraph on clinical ratios set by the board and partners. Retirement eligibility and specialty credentials appear as further constraints. The delivery section classifies 16 courses by how they actually run and identifies six hybrid courses with no shared design. The placement section counts groups by site and specialty, notes the unit closures and flags two single-preceptor sites, citing Spector and colleagues. Four italic gaps follow, then a section on unmeasured preparation hours and partner capacity, with Iwasiw and colleagues on stating limits.
NURS 8546 Week 2 rubric: what earns full marks
Expect the marks for a needs assessment to follow whether the figures are accurate and to the point, the clarity of the gaps and the discipline of leaving solutions out. Faculty tend to reward inventories built from documents and reported in units a program schedules, since those can be checked. Gaps earn credit when stated precisely, as a distance between commitment and capacity, rather than as complaints. Papers lose points when they slide into recommendations, because that takes space from the description and assumes the outcome. Naming what could not be measured shows judgment and is often credited separately. The last points usually go to arithmetic a reader can follow and references set out in APA form.
NURS 8546 Week 2 help from the desk
Needs assessments often turn into arguments for a change the writer already prefers, with data selected to support it. Others describe the program in general terms, such as faculty being stretched, without numbers anyone could verify. Some count faculty hours that were never recorded, which weakens the whole inventory. Start by listing the documents you can actually obtain, then report only what they show, in the units your program uses. Write the gaps last and keep each to one sentence. If your program's records cannot be shared, build a composite with realistic figures and label it as one. Our writers can prepare a needs assessment around a described program, with capacity, delivery and placement sections and clearly stated gaps.
Get a NURS 8546 Week 2 example written to your instructions
Forward the Assignment prompt, the rubric and whatever your section says about the program being assessed, and a Week 2 example returns built as an inventory with gaps stated as differences. No charge on the first custom sample and it lands within 24 to 48 hours. Real enrollment files and placement contracts never need to be sent for this.
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NURS 8546 Week 2 questions, answered
Can the assessment cover my own program?
Sections often prefer that, and the structure holds either way. A described version of a real program supports identical inventory work, since the argument runs on the shape of capacity and supply rather than on which school is being described. Where a prompt requires a named institution, public documents such as a catalog and an accreditation report usually carry the weight comfortably.
Is this the same as a gap analysis?
Related and not identical, and prompts in this course sometimes use both words in one sentence. An assessment establishes the current state and reports differences from what has been committed. A gap analysis usually starts from an external standard and traces the distance to it. The example ends where the second one would begin, which is the safer reading when a prompt is ambiguous.
How many sources does an inventory need?
Fewer scholarly citations than an argument paper and considerably more documents. Catalogs, schedules, workforce reports and accreditation standards do most of the work, and a short scholarly layer supports whatever framework organizes the inventory. Rubrics setting a source minimum usually count both kinds, so a document heavy assessment satisfies them without stretching for journal articles.
Where can I find a free NURS 8546 Week 2 sample paper?
The full inventory of capacity, delivery and placements, with its four gaps, is shown above, and it costs nothing to read.
How does the NURS 8546 Week 2 assessment measure faculty capacity?
In sections rather than hours: 13 full-time faculty at three sections and 10 adjuncts at two give 59 sections against 62 scheduled, a gap the program closes with overload.