NURS9000 sets the foundation for the entire DNP project sequence — identifying a practice problem specific enough to address, significant enough to matter, and feasible enough to complete within the DNP timeline.
Problem identification at the doctoral level
NURS9000 requires DNP students to identify a genuine, organizationally significant practice problem grounded in their own clinical or leadership context — distinct from a BSN or MSN-level practice improvement idea in its scope and organizational impact. Students conduct a thorough needs assessment, gathering data from multiple sources (clinical outcomes data, staff interviews, existing quality reports) to build a well-evidenced case that the identified problem is real and worth a doctoral-level intervention.
Organizational assessment and stakeholder mapping
The course requires a formal organizational assessment — understanding the practice site's readiness for change, existing resources, competing priorities, and the key stakeholders whose support will be essential for the eventual project's success. This assessment shapes what kind of intervention is realistically feasible, preventing students from designing an idealized project that has no chance of actually being implemented in their specific organizational context.
Key topics in NURS9000
- Identifying an organizationally significant practice problem at the doctoral level
- Conducting a multi-source needs assessment: clinical data, staff input, quality reports
- Formal organizational readiness and stakeholder assessment
- Distinguishing DNP-level project scope from MSN-level practice improvement
- Initial project feasibility analysis given organizational resources and constraints
- Framing the practice problem in preparation for the literature review phase
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Worked example: scoping a DNP-appropriate practice problem
- Too narrow (MSN-level): "Improve one nurse's hand hygiene compliance"
- Appropriately scoped (DNP-level): "Reduce hospital-acquired infection rates across a 40-bed medical unit through a systemic hand hygiene compliance and accountability program"
- Needs assessment evidence: Unit infection rates trending above the hospital system average for three consecutive quarters, staff interviews revealing inconsistent accountability structures
- Organizational readiness: Unit leadership has already flagged this as a priority, increasing feasibility for a doctoral-level intervention to gain traction
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DNP problem identification and organizational assessment assignments.
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Frequently asked questions
A BSN-level project (like the NURS4900 capstone) typically addresses a focused, unit-level practice change with a relatively contained scope, and an MSN-level project often extends this to a specific specialty or leadership context. A DNP-level project is expected to address a more organizationally significant problem with broader systemic impact — often spanning multiple units, involving more complex stakeholder dynamics, and requiring a more sophisticated evidence base and implementation strategy, reflecting the DNP's terminal-practice-degree status and its expectation that graduates lead system-level practice change, not just unit-level improvement. NURS9000 teaches students to calibrate their problem scope to this doctoral level — neither so narrow that it doesn't demonstrate doctoral-level leadership capacity, nor so broad that it becomes infeasible to implement and measure within the DNP program's timeline.
A practice problem can be genuinely significant in the abstract, but if the specific organization where the DNP student practices lacks the readiness, resources, or leadership support to implement a meaningful intervention addressing it, the project simply won't be able to move forward regardless of how well-evidenced the problem identification is. NURS9000 requires organizational assessment early, alongside problem identification, because DNP projects are fundamentally applied and implementation-dependent — unlike a purely academic research question that can be studied regardless of any single organization's willingness to change, a DNP project requires genuine organizational buy-in and capacity to execute, meaning the assessment of organizational readiness isn't a secondary consideration but a co-equal factor in determining what project is realistically achievable.