| Course | NR 513 Professional Role Enhancement |
|---|---|
| Week | 6 |
| Paper type | Professional organization brief (memo) |
| Length | About 890 words, 2 pages |
| Format | Memo with APA 7 citations |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | MSN |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for NR 513 Week 6
Memorandum
To: PACU and pre-admission testing nurses, community hospital perioperative services
From: Student Name, RN, CPAN, MSN student
Date: Month Day, Year
Re: Should you join the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses? What the society is, how it works, and what it produces
Bottom Line
If you work in Phase I, Phase II or pre-admission testing, the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses (ASPAN) is the body that writes the standards you are already judged against, whether or not you are a member. Joining gives you a vote on who leads it and a route to influence what it says. Not joining leaves those decisions to others. The rest of this memo explains the machinery so you can judge whether that is worth the dues.
Who It Claims to Speak For
ASPAN was founded in 1980 and describes itself as representing the interests of 60,000 nurses who specialize in preanesthesia and postanesthesia care, ambulatory surgery and pain management (American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses, n.d.). Note the wording: 60,000 is the number of nurses whose interests it claims to represent, not necessarily the number of members. That distinction matters when the society speaks in public. It speaks for the specialty, but only its members choose what it says.
ASPAN is not the certification body. The CPAN and CAPA credentials are awarded by a separate organization, the American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification, which sets its own recertification rules (American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification, n.d.). Joining ASPAN does not certify you, and certification does not make you a member.
The Machinery
Membership and dues. Members pay annual dues. Membership is individual, and state or regional component societies organize local education and meetings; if you join, ask which component covers our hospital and whether local membership is included.
Governance. A Board of Directors runs the society between meetings, and its officers and directors are chosen through a national process in which members volunteer by submitting a willingness-to-serve form (American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses, n.d.). A delegate body, the Representative Assembly, meets at the national conference and endorses clinical documents. In practice, that means the standards our unit follows are approved by nurses sent from component societies, and any member can seek to be one of them.
Who decides what it says in public. Standards, practice recommendations and position statements are drafted by committees of member nurses and endorsed through the society's governance before publication. That is the lever most worth knowing about: a nurse who serves on a standards or clinical practice committee is helping write the document every PACU in the country will be measured against.
What It Produces
Standards. ASPAN publishes its perianesthesia nursing standards, practice recommendations and interpretive statements on a two-year cycle, and the edition now in force is dated 2025-2026 (American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses, 2025). This is the document our staffing and discharge policies should cite. Its Phase I staffing recommendation, which does not allow a lone nurse to recover a Phase I patient even on call nights, is the one most relevant to our night schedule.
Position statements. The society issues position statements on questions such as acuity-based staffing for Phase I. They carry less weight than standards but are often cited by managers building budgets.
A journal and a conference. The Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing publishes research and practice articles in the specialty. The national conference offers contact hours that count toward CPAN and CAPA recertification, which now requires 70 perianesthesia-related contact hours every three years (American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification, n.d.).
Who each output is aimed at matters. Standards are aimed at nurses and at the managers and accreditors who judge nursing practice. Position statements are aimed at hospital leaders and policymakers. The journal is aimed at nurses who want evidence, and the conference at nurses who need hours and contacts.
What It Can Do That You Cannot
You can raise a concern about our night staffing with our manager. You cannot, alone, change what the national standard says about night staffing or make other hospitals follow it. ASPAN can. When our unit argued last year for a second nurse on call, the strongest page in the proposal was a quotation from the ASPAN standard, because it came from a national body and not from us. That is the practical value of a specialty society: it turns what individual nurses know into a document that others must answer.
Limits Worth Knowing
ASPAN's standards are professional recommendations, not law. A hospital can choose not to follow them, and many do not follow every part. The society has no power to inspect our unit or enforce its standards. Its influence works through accreditors, courts and managers who treat the standards as the expected level of care. If you join expecting the society to fix our staffing, you will be disappointed. If you join to have a voice in what the standard says, and to use it in our own discussions, you will get what you pay for.
Recommendation
Join if you work in the PACU or pre-admission testing and plan to stay in the specialty for more than a year or two. Attend one component society meeting before deciding whether to volunteer for anything larger. If you are working toward CPAN or CAPA, count the conference and journal contact hours toward recertification before paying for hours elsewhere.
References
American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification. (n.d.). CPAN and CAPA recertification eligibility requirements. Retrieved September 30, 2026, from https://www.cpancapa.org/recertify/eligibility/
American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses. (2025). 2025-2026 perianesthesia nursing standards, practice recommendations and interpretive statements. https://www.aspan.org/Publications-Resources/ASPAN-Publications/ASPAN-Standards
American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses. (n.d.). About ASPAN. Retrieved September 30, 2026, from https://www.aspan.org/About/About-ASPAN
The Chamberlain NR 513 Week 6 instructions
The Week 6 assignment asks you to research a professional nursing organization related to your specialty or role. Prompts usually ask for its mission, membership, structure, benefits, activities in advocacy or standard setting, and how membership would support your professional development. Some sections want a paper, others a brief, poster or presentation. Choose an organization specific enough to speak for a specialty, since broad organizations make the specialty part of the prompt hard to answer. Use the organization's own publications for facts, check any numbers you quote, and cite them in APA 7. Check your section's format and length before you start, since a brief and a paper call for different styles.
Inside the NR 513 Week 6 example
The example is written for a colleague deciding whether to join, which keeps it factual. It begins with a bottom line, then explains who the society claims to represent, noting that its figure refers to nurses whose interests it represents rather than members. It separates the society from the certification board. The machinery section covers dues, component societies, the national volunteer process and the delegate body that endorses clinical documents. The outputs section explains the biennial standards, position statements, the journal and the conference, and says who each is aimed at. An example shows how a quotation from the standard strengthened a unit proposal. The memo ends on limits and a recommendation.
NR 513 Week 6 rubric: what full points look like
Rubrics for the organization assignment usually reward accurate information about the organization, analysis of its role in the profession, and a clear link to the student's own development. Graders look for more than the organization's own summary; the analysis criterion rewards explaining how the body works and what it can accomplish. Specific outputs, such as standards or position statements, earn more than general statements about advocacy. A criterion on professional growth asks how membership would help you in the advanced role. Sources should include the organization's official materials. Format points depend on the deliverable, so a memo is graded on clarity and structure, with APA 7 citations and references expected throughout.
NR 513 Week 6 help from the desk
The largest loss comes from a brief that rebuilds the organization's website, starting with its founding year and moving through its mission, with nothing the writer worked out. Explain the machinery: dues, governance, how leaders are chosen and who decides public positions. Another mistake is choosing an organization so broad that the specialty part of the assignment disappears. Listing outputs without saying whom they are aimed at leaves the reader unable to judge their value. Check every number against the organization's current pages, and be careful with membership figures, which are often reported in different ways. Finally, include limits. An honest line on what the organization cannot do makes the recommendation more credible.
Get a NR 513 Week 6 example written to your instructions
Send the assignment and rubric your classroom publishes, plus the organization your section wants examined or your own specialty if the choice is yours, and a custom brief comes back inside 24-48h with the first one free. Where the prompt asks for a comparison or a set number of sources, note it and the example arrives in that shape.
More NR 513 papers and MSN samples
- NR 513 Week 1: Discussion Post on Credential Duties
- NR 513 Week 2: Standards Analysis, Phase I Staffing
- NR 513 Week 3: Philosophy of Practice Statement
- NR 513 Week 4: Ethics Case Analysis, PACU Transfer
- NR 513 Week 5: Scholarly Writing Exercise
- NR 513 Week 7: Precepting Reflection
- NR 513 Week 8: Role Enhancement Plan
- NR 510F Week 6: Credentialing Checklist
- NR 510 Week 6: Practice Marketing Plan
- NR 508 Week 6: Therapeutic Failure Write-up
- NR 506NP Week 6: Professional Organization Analysis
NR 513 Week 6 questions, answered
Can I write about a body I already belong to?
Usually yes, and existing membership tends to produce a sharper brief because the writer knows what the dues actually buy. The risk is advocacy replacing analysis, so the example still includes the comparison paragraph and still allows the recommendation to come out lukewarm. A brief that cannot find a limitation reads as promotional to a marker.
What if my organization does not publish membership numbers?
Say so rather than estimating. Constituency can be described by scope instead: which credential the body represents, which practice settings, whether membership runs through state chapters. Inventing a figure risks more than the sentence is worth, and a brief that is candid about what it could not establish reads as more careful, not less thorough.
Where does this stop being a policy assignment?
A policy assignment asks what a rule should say. This one asks what an organization is and what it does with its members behind it, which includes policy work but is not limited to it. If your draft has turned into an argument about a piece of legislation, the brief has wandered, and the way back is through the body and its machinery.
Where can I find a free NR 513 Week 6 sample paper?
Scroll up for it. The ASPAN memo is a complete NR 513 Week 6 brief and can be read in full here. Nurses who belong to a different specialty society can ask for a brief on that body instead.
Can the NR 513 organization assignment be a memo?
It depends on your section. Some ask for a paper, others for a brief, poster or presentation. The sample uses a memo to colleagues because that format keeps the content practical. Follow the format your instructor names.