In your professional life, you will need to find credible evidence to support your decisions and your plans of action. You will want to keep abreast of best practices to help your organization adapt to the ever-changing health care environment. Being adept at research will help you find the information you need. For this assessment, you will review the Assessment Topic Areas media piece and select one of the health care problems or issues to research, which will be a current health care problem or issue faced by a health care organization that is of interest to you.
Note: The requirements outlined below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. At a minimum, be sure to address each point. In addition, you are encouraged to review the performance-level descriptions for each criterion to see how your work will be assessed.
For this assessment, research best practices related to a current health care problem. Your selected problem or issue will be utilized again in Assessment 3. To explore your chosen topic, you should use the first two steps of the Socratic Problem-Solving Approach to aid your critical thinking.
View the Assessment Topic Areas media piece and select one of the health care problems or issues in the media piece to research. Write a brief overview of the selected topic. In your overview:
Summarize the health care problem or issue.
Describe your interest in the topic.
Describe any professional experience you have with this topic.
Identify peer-reviewed articles relevant to health care issue or problem.
Conduct a search for scholarly or academic peer-reviewed literature related to the topic and describe the criteria you used to search for articles, including the names of the databases you used. You will select four current scholarly or academic peer-reviewed journal articles published during the past 3–5 years that relate to your topic.
Refer to the NHS-FPX4000: Developing a Health Care Perspective Library Guide to help you locate appropriate references.
Use keywords related to the health care problem or issue you are researching to select relevant articles.
Assess the credibility and explain relevance of the information sources you find.
Determine if the source is from an academic peer-reviewed journal.
Determine if the publication is current.
Determine if information in the academic peer-reviewed journal article is still relevant.
Analyze academic peer-reviewed journal articles using the annotated bibliography organizational format. Provide rationale for inclusion of each selected article. The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to document a list of references along with key information about each one. The detail about the reference is the annotation. Developing this annotated bibliography will create a foundation of knowledge about the selected topic. In your annotated bibliography:
Identify the purpose of the article.
Summarize the information.
Provide rationale for inclusion of each article.
Include the conclusions and findings of the article.
Write your annotated bibliography in a paragraph form. The annotated bibliography should be approximately 150 words (1–3 paragraphs) in length.
List the full reference for the source in APA format (author, date, title, publisher, et cetera) and use APA format for the annotated bibliography.
Make sure the references are listed in alphabetical order, are double-spaced, and use hanging indents.
Summarize what you have learned from developing an annotated bibliography.
Summarize what you learned from your research in a separate paragraph or two at the end of the paper.
List the main points you learned from your research.
Summarize the main contributions of the sources you chose and how they enhanced your knowledge about the topic.
How do you approach a problem or issue within your organization? How often do you need credible information to solve a personal or professional problem? Credible information is information that is trustworthy. One of the best sources for credible information is the professional literature of the field you are studying; in your case, it will be health care. Professional literature is research that has been written and reviewed by other people in your field.
The following resources can help you as you complete your research and seek out professional literature on a health care topic:
Gennaro, S. (2016). Why write? Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 48(2), 117.
National Library of Medicine. (n.d.). National information center on health services research & health care technology (NICHSR).https://hsric.nlm.nih.gov/hsric_public/topic/evidence_based_practice/
Rollins, J. A. (2017). Healthcare: It’s “so complicated.” Pediatric Nursing, 43(2), 58, 102.
Each of the following research guides is written with a specific program in mind. The one for your program can provide insights about researching topics related to your field:
BSN Program Library Research Guide.
Public Health Undergraduate Program Library Guide.
Health Care Administration Undergraduate Library Research Guide.
The following resources provide specific information about annotated bibliographies:
What Not to Do: Source Material for the Annotated Bibliography.
Sample Annotated Bibliography [PDF].
