| Course | NR 702A DNP Project & Practicum I |
|---|---|
| Week | 3 |
| Paper type | Setting description paper |
| Length | About 1,170 words, 5 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NR 702A Week 3
Setting Description Paper: The Adult Primary Care Service at One Federally Qualified Health Center Site, How Its Day Runs and Where Decisions Get Made
Student Name
College of Nursing, Chamberlain University
NR 702A: DNP Project & Practicum I
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Setting Description Paper: The Adult Primary Care Service at One Federally Qualified Health Center Site, How Its Day Runs and Where Decisions Get Made
The Service
Adult primary care at one of the health center's five sites, in a mid-sized city. The site serves adults of all ages, most of them on Medicaid or uninsured, with a sliding fee scale. About 1,100 adult visits a month across nine primary care clinicians: four physicians and five nurse practitioners. A pediatric service and a dental service share the building but run separately.
Who comes through: adults with chronic conditions, especially diabetes and hypertension, adults seeking urgent care for minor illness and new patients establishing care. About 40% of visits are conducted in Spanish, with bilingual staff or an interpreter.
How the Day Runs
The site opens at 08:00 and closes at 19:00 on weekdays, with a Saturday morning session from 08:00 to 12:00. Primary care visits are booked in 20-minute slots; new patient and annual visits are 40 minutes.
At the start of each visit, a medical assistant rooms the patient, takes vital signs and administers the PHQ-2 on a tablet in the patient's language; anyone scoring positive on the two-item screen goes on to the full nine items. The clinician sees the score in the record during the visit.
Behavioral health: one licensed clinical social worker works full-time as the behavioral health consultant, seeing patients for 30-minute visits from 08:30 to 17:00 on weekdays. A psychologist works Tuesdays and Thursdays. A behavioral health assistant calls referred patients to book. Same-day visits with the consultant happen when a slot is open, which is most mornings and few afternoons.
At the quiet end: after 17:00 and on Saturdays, no behavioral health clinician is in the building. Clinicians who see a positive screen then can only place a referral.
What Gets Written Down, and Where
PHQ-2 and PHQ-9 scores are entered in structured fields in the electronic record. Referrals to behavioral health are orders in the record. The behavioral health assistant's call attempts and outcomes are recorded in a referral log, a spreadsheet on the behavioral health shared drive, not in the record. Completed behavioral health visits are encounters in the record. The quality analyst pulls the screening data each quarter for the dashboard.
That split, between the record and a spreadsheet, is why matching positive screens to completed contacts took the analyst a special request.
Where a Decision Would Be Made
The site's operations meeting, every Tuesday at 07:30, run by the site medical director and the practice manager, decides scheduling and workflow changes at the site. The behavioral health team meets on Wednesdays and decides the consultant's template. The health center's quality committee, monthly, chaired by the chief medical officer, sets quality targets and reviews the dashboard; it would have to approve any change to how the measure is reported. The board's quality committee approves the annual quality plan.
A change to how positive screens are handed to behavioral health would need the site medical director and the director of behavioral health to agree, and the quality committee to be informed. In practice the Tuesday meeting is where workflow changes are tried first, because it brings together the people who would carry them on the floor, and changes that start there tend to reach the committee as reports rather than requests.
What the Writer Can Reach
My position at the site is both an advantage and a limit for the project. As a nurse practitioner at the site, I attend the Tuesday operations meeting and can request agenda time. I can ask the behavioral health team for time at their Wednesday meeting through the director. I can request aggregate data from the quality analyst. I cannot change the consultant's schedule, add staff or alter the referral log's design myself. Being an employee gives me access to meetings and colleagues an outside student would not have, but it also means the project must not look like a clinician pushing their own preferences onto another team.
How Staff Describe the Handoff
Medical assistants describe the screen as quick and routine. Clinicians describe a positive screen as the start of a conversation they often do not have time to finish in a 20-minute visit. The behavioral health assistant describes a callback list that grows faster on busy days than it can be worked. The consultant describes a schedule built for booked visits, with few open slots for patients sent from a visit in progress. Each description is accurate, and together they explain why the handoff happens after the patient leaves.
The Measures the Service Already Uses
The PHQ-9, a validated depression severity measure (Kroenke et al., 2001), is already collected in a structured field at every adult visit where the two-item screen is positive. That matters for any project, because the measure exists without extra work. The behavioral health team also repeats the PHQ-9 at follow-up visits, which would allow later work to look at symptom change, not only at contact.
Funding and What It Makes the Service Careful About
The health center receives federal health center funding and bills Medicaid, Medicare and private insurers. Its funding depends partly on reporting quality measures and on serving patients regardless of ability to pay. That makes it careful about documentation and about anything that increases visit length without being billable. Behavioral health visits on the same day as a primary care visit are billable in some circumstances, which affects how a same-day contact would be valued.
Recent Changes at the Site
The site moved to tablet-based screening in 2025, replacing paper forms, which made PHQ-9 scores structured and searchable for the first time. The behavioral health assistant position, which makes callbacks, was vacant for six weeks in early 2026 and will be vacant again from November 2026 to January 2027 while the current assistant is on leave. The site gained a second Saturday clinician in the summer, increasing Saturday visits when no behavioral health clinician is present. Each change affects the handoff, and each is recorded here so that the project can account for it when reading later figures.
Why the Setting Matters for the Project
The project would work at a single handoff in a single site, with the people who control that handoff meeting weekly. The constraint is the consultant's afternoon availability and the absence of behavioral health after 17:00. Collaborative care depends on behavioral health being available within primary care (Archer et al., 2012), and this site has the structure but not always the timing. In the large collaborative care trial, care managers made early contact a routine part of the model (Unützer et al., 2002), which is the step this site's timing interrupts.
References
Archer, J., Bower, P., Gilbody, S., Lovell, K., Richards, D., Gask, L., Dickens, C., & Coventry, P. (2012). Collaborative care for depression and anxiety problems. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2012(10), CD006525. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006525.pub2
Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. W. (2001). The PHQ-9: Validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16(9), 606-613. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x
Unützer, J., Katon, W., Callahan, C. M., Williams, J. W., Jr., Hunkeler, E., Harpole, L., Hoffing, M., Della Penna, R. D., Noël, P. H., Lin, E. H. B., Areán, P. A., Hegel, M. T., Tang, L., Belin, T. R., Oishi, S., & Langston, C. (2002). Collaborative care management of late-life depression in the primary care setting: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 288(22), 2836-2845. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.288.22.2836
Reading the NR 702A Week 3 instructions
Describe the service, not the whole organization, and let its scale register early: what it does, who comes through and roughly how many. Give the hours it is open and say who is physically present at the quiet end of them, since a project that depends on a particular presence is a different project. Explain how work is recorded and where those records sit. Name the meetings where decisions about this service are actually made, and say who attends. Describe what you, as the student, can reach and what you cannot. Note what funding makes the service careful about. Record recent changes that could affect your project's measures.
How the NR 702A Week 3 example is put together
The sample describes adult primary care at one of five sites, with four physicians, five nurse practitioners and about 40% of visits in Spanish. Hours run 08:00 to 19:00 on weekdays and Saturday mornings; tablet screening triggers the PHQ-9, and the behavioral health consultant works until 17:00 with a psychologist two days a week. Scores and referrals sit in the record, while callbacks sit in a separate spreadsheet. The Tuesday operations meeting, Wednesday behavioral health meeting and monthly quality committee are named. Staff descriptions of the handoff, funding pressures and changes such as tablet screening and an assistant's leave are included. It explains that callback attempts live in a spreadsheet separate from the record, which is why matching took a special request, and notes the billing rules that make the service careful about visit length.
Reading the NR 702A Week 3 grading rubric
Setting descriptions lose most when they describe the whole health system, its mission and history, and never reach the service where the project happens. Next is a description with no numbers, so the reader cannot judge scale. Many papers give opening hours but never say who is present at the quiet end, which matters for any change involving timing. Where data are recorded is often left out, though it decides what can be measured. Decision-making is described from the organizational chart rather than the meetings where changes are actually agreed. Papers that leave out what the student can and cannot reach overstate what the project can do. Papers that never mention recent changes at the site also leave later shifts in the data unexplained. A description of how staff talk about the work often reveals more than the organizational chart.
NR 702A Week 3 help from the desk
Describing your own workplace as an outsider would see it takes some deliberate distance. A guided draft can help you set out the service's scale, hours, workflow and records, and identify the meetings where decisions about it are made. We can also help you describe what you can reach and what recent changes might affect your project. Shadowing one full day, including the quiet end, often shows something the description would otherwise miss. The setting is yours. Recording how staff describe the same handoff is worth doing too.
Get a NR 702A Week 3 example written to your instructions
Upload the rubric your section published for the setting paper, tell us what kind of service you work in and roughly how big it is, and the description is written to that shape. Nothing about your employer is repeated anywhere. A first sample comes back inside 24 to 48 hours at no charge.
More NR 702A papers and DNP samples
- NR 702A Week 1: DNP Trouble Post
- NR 702A Week 2: Practice Gap Write-Up
- NR 702A Week 4: Site Agreement Summary
- NR 702A Week 5: Aim Statement Draft
- NR 702A Week 6: Project Charter Draft
- NR 702A Week 7: Practicum Objective Set
- NR 702A Week 8: Proposal Readiness Memo
NR 702A Week 3 questions, answered
How much detail is too much?
The test most faculty apply is whether a fact changes the project. Bed numbers matter if the project touches admissions; the building's age almost never matters. A finished paper of this kind reads short and dense, with every paragraph earning its place by ruling something in or out for the work ahead. Detail that survives that test is rarely excessive, however long the paper runs.
Should I describe the unit as it is supposed to work or as it works?
As it works, with the written version noted where the two come apart. The distance between the policy and the practice is often the project, and a paper that reports only the policy has described a place nobody would recognize. Say plainly that a step is skipped when the service is busy, and attribute the observation to what you have seen rather than to anyone by name.
I work nights. Does that change the setting paper?
It changes it more than most writers expect, and saying so earns marks. A service running at three in the morning has different staffing, different access to support and a different volume, and a project built around what happens at ten will not hold there. Describe the part of the day you can actually work in, and be explicit that it is the part you can reach.
Where can I find a free NR 702A Week 3 sample paper?
You can read the whole setting description of an adult primary care service at a federally qualified health center right here.
Why does the NR 702A Week 3 paper note who is present after 17:00?
No behavioral health clinician is in the building then or on Saturdays, so any same-day handoff could not work at those times.