NURS 765 Week 5 Group Project Part 1: Key Elements and Degree Completion Plan Example

Key Elements and Degree Completion Plan for a Post-Master's Doctor of Nursing Practice in Rural Health Systems Leadership

The Program and Its Students

Our group's curriculum is a post-master's Doctor of Nursing Practice with a single focus, rural health systems leadership (RHSL), offered by the school of nursing at a private Christian university in southwest Virginia. The program admits nurses who already hold a master's degree in nursing, including nurse practitioners, nurse managers and public health nurses, and who work in rural hospitals, clinics, health departments and long-term care. Our frame factor assessments found a region where hospital closures, gaps in screening and chronic disease care and workforce shortages have outpaced the supply of nurses prepared to lead improvement, and where distance and cost keep many nurses from doctoral study. Keating (2015) describes the key elements of a curriculum as the mission, philosophy, organizing framework and outcomes that give the program its identity, followed by the plan through which students achieve them. This paper sets out those elements and the degree completion plan.

Mission and Vision

The mission of the RHSL DNP is to prepare nurse leaders who, grounded in Christian faith and the highest level of nursing practice, improve the health of rural communities by leading safe, effective and sustainable systems of care. The vision is that within ten years of the first cohort, every county in the university's service region will have at least one DNP-prepared nurse leading an improvement effort in a local health organization.

The mission sits within the university's mission of training leaders who serve, and within the school of nursing's mission of preparing nurses who integrate faith and practice. It narrows both to a population and a role. Keating (2015) advises that a program's mission be consistent with the parent institution's and short enough that faculty can test decisions against it, and our group wrote it to pass that test: a proposed course, project or partnership either helps rural communities through better-led systems of care or it does not belong in the program. The vision is deliberately measurable. A vision of "every county" can be checked against a map of graduates' workplaces each year, and the program evaluation in Part 3 will report that map to the partner council.

Philosophy

The faculty hold five beliefs that shape the program.

Persons are created in the image of God, with dignity that does not depend on where they live or what they can pay.

Health is a state of wholeness that is shaped as much by the conditions of a community as by individual choices, so rural health requires attention to systems and places as well as patients.

Nursing at the doctoral level of practice is the leadership of change: translating evidence into practice, improving systems and advocating for policies that let people be well.

Learning for experienced nurses builds on their practice; adult learners bring knowledge to the program, and the program should connect new knowledge to the problems they face at work.

Leadership is service. When his disciples argued about which of them was greatest, Jesus answered, "Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Luke 22:26). The program teaches leadership as responsibility for the good of others rather than as status, and it expects graduates to measure their success by the health of the communities they serve rather than by their titles.

Organizing Framework

Three threads, rural populations, systems leadership and practice scholarship, give the program its framework, and no course is approved unless it carries at least two of them. Rural populations covers the epidemiology, culture and access problems of rural communities. Systems leadership covers organizations, finance, policy, informatics and the leadership of teams. Practice scholarship covers evidence appraisal, quality improvement and the DNP project. Each course is assigned a primary thread and at least one secondary thread, and each thread is assessed in at least one signature assignment per year. Pittman et al. (2026) describe a gap analysis method in which faculty map courses to the 2021 AACN Essentials using backward design, and we will use that method to confirm that the threads together reach every advanced-level domain.

End-of-Program Outcomes

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2021) organizes advanced-level nursing education into ten domains and eight concepts that run across them, including health policy, ethics and the social determinants of health. Our seven outcomes are written at the advanced level and mapped to the domains below.

The group wrote seven outcomes rather than ten because several domains are best reached together in the work rural leaders actually do; a quality project, for example, requires interprofessional partnership and systems thinking at once. Mapping each outcome to more than one domain, and checking the table for any domain left without an outcome, keeps the list short without leaving a gap. Each outcome uses a verb that can be observed in practice, following the competency-based approach that Majumdar et al. (2026) describe in a DNP redesign in which course objectives were rewritten as measurable, practice-based outcomes and the project was divided into milestones with rubrics. Outcome 7 connects the philosophy's belief about leadership to Domains 9 and 10. Every outcome also carries at least one of the Essentials concepts: the social determinants of health in Outcome 1, evidence-based practice in Outcomes 2 and 3, health policy in Outcome 6 and ethics in Outcome 7. The concepts give faculty a second way to check the map, since a concept that appears in no outcome is likely to disappear from the courses.

Admission Requirements

Admission is the first place the mission becomes practical, since the program can only produce rural leaders if it admits nurses who are likely to remain in rural practice. Applicants must hold a master's degree in nursing from an accredited program with a graduate grade point average of at least 3.0, an active and unencumbered registered nurse license and at least two years of nursing experience, one of them in a rural or underserved setting. Each applicant submits a two-page essay naming an improvement need in the organization where they work now, a letter of support from a supervisor and an official record of supervised clinical hours from the master's program, which the gap analysis below uses.

Degree Completion Plan

The program requires 36 credits over six semesters of part-time study, two courses a semester, beginning in the fall. Students attend a three-day campus intensive at the start of the first fall and in the second fall, when they present project proposals.

Two courses a semester keeps the load at six credits, which our survey of regional nurses suggested was the most a full-time employee could manage, and the summer terms let the program finish in two calendar years without overloading any single term. The sequence places population health and systems leadership first, because students cannot choose a worthwhile project problem without them. Evidence appraisal and policy follow in the spring, and quality improvement methods come in the first summer, alongside the course in which students define their project problem. Finance and data skills arrive in the second year, just as students plan and implement their projects, so the content is used as soon as it is taught.

Practice Hours and the Gap Analysis

The Essentials expect a DNP graduate to complete at least 1,000 hours of practice after the baccalaureate as part of a supervised academic program (AACN, 2021). Students in the program bring verified supervised clinical hours from their master's programs, and the program provides 540 hours through the four project courses. At admission, the graduate program director reviews each student's master's transcript and clinical record. Students with at least 460 verified hours complete the standard plan; students with fewer, such as some nurse educators and administrators, add one or two practicum courses of 120 hours each, taken in the student's own organization under a doctorally prepared preceptor. The rule is published with the plan so no student discovers a gap in the final semester. Students who need added hours complete them in the first summer and second fall, before implementation begins, so that the extra time does not delay the project. Each practicum course has its own objectives tied to Program Outcomes 4 and 5, so the hours develop leadership in the student's own organization rather than repeating clinical work done in the master's program.

The DNP Project Across Four Courses

The project runs through four three-credit courses rather than one capstone. In Project I, the student defines a problem with the home organization and writes a proposal; in Project II, the student plans the intervention, measures and approvals; in Project III, the student implements; and in Project IV, the student evaluates and disseminates. SQUIRE 2.0, the quality improvement reporting standard, gave one school's project courses across six specialties a common structure that made projects more consistent and precise (Thiele & Armstrong, 2025), and our project courses will use SQUIRE 2.0 as the template for the final report. Because many students will design improvements for rural organizations similar to those in the regional model that Martinez et al. (2026) evaluated, in which rural cohorts and campus intensives supported students who stayed to practice in rural places, the second intensive is timed to let students present proposals to faculty and partner organizations in person.

How the Elements Fit Together

The elements are meant to be read as one argument. The mission names rural communities and leadership; the philosophy explains why the faculty see leadership as service and health as shaped by place; the framework turns those beliefs into three threads; the outcomes state the observable abilities each thread should produce; and the degree plan orders the courses so that each outcome is introduced, practiced and demonstrated. When the group drafts the syllabus in Part 2, every course outcome will need to trace to a program outcome in the table above, and the evaluation in Part 3 will measure the program against those same seven outcomes.

Conclusion

This first part of the project gives the RHSL DNP an identity and a path. Its key elements commit the faculty to rural communities and servant leadership, its outcomes reach every advanced-level domain of the Essentials and its plan lets working nurses finish in two years with 540 hours of supervised practice. A degree plan is a promise to students about time and effort, and it should be as carefully reasoned as the outcomes it serves. The next part will test that promise by building one course in full.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Publications/Essentials-2021.pdf

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Keating, S. B. (Ed.). (2015). Curriculum development and evaluation in nursing (3rd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.

Majumdar, J. R., Yermal, S. J., Jolade, E., & Clark-Cutaia, M. (2026). Putting practice first in Doctor of Nursing Practice: A competency-based curriculum redesign. Journal of Nursing Education, 65(9), 557-560. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20260227-01

Martinez, R. M., Perry, C. K., Izumi, S., Chipman, T. C., & Franklin, H. (2026). A regional delivery model for rural graduate nurse practitioner education: A mixed-methods evaluation. Journal of Nursing Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20260827-02

Pittman, J., Anderson, J., Bentley, E., Clanton, C., Hammonds, L. S., McCoy, K. T., Otts, J. A., Riley, B. H., & Sturm, T. A. (2026). Gap analysis methodology for mapping baccalaureate and graduate nursing curricula to the AACN Essentials: A step-wise approach. Journal of Professional Nursing, 63, 26-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2025.12.009

Thiele, D. K., & Armstrong, G. (2025). Implementing SQUIRE guidelines to improve standardization and rigor of DNP projects. Journal of Professional Nursing, 56, 85-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2024.12.004