NURS 765 Week 6 Group Project Part 2: Course Overview and Syllabus Example

Course Overview and Syllabus for RHSL 815 Health Policy, Regulation and Advocacy for Rural Care, With Links to the AACN Essentials and Program Outcomes

Why This Course

From the eleven courses in our degree plan, the group chose RHSL 815, Health Policy, Regulation and Advocacy for Rural Care, for this part of the project. Our frame factor assessments found that policy and regulation shape rural care in ways that local leaders feel every day, from scope of practice rules in neighboring states to federal staffing requirements in critical access hospitals. The course also carries Program Outcome 6, advocacy for policies that improve access and equity, which is the outcome our partners were least sure graduates would reach. Keating (2015) treats the course syllabus as the point where the curriculum becomes something students experience, so the course that carries the riskiest outcome is the right one to build in full.

A second reason for the choice is practical. Policy courses are often the first to drift toward general content, because instructors can teach health policy from national news without ever touching a rural problem, so a fully specified syllabus protects the rural focus that justifies this program.

Course Information

Course Description

This course prepares doctoral nurse leaders to analyze, influence and implement health policy that affects rural populations and health organizations. Students examine how federal, state and organizational policies are made, how regulation shapes the rural health workforce and the services rural organizations can offer and how nurse leaders use evidence to advocate for change. Through a regulatory analysis, a stakeholder map and a policy brief written for a real decision maker, students apply policy knowledge to a problem in their own region. The course integrates a Christian understanding of justice and advocacy for people who lack power to speak for themselves.

Course Outcomes and Their Links

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2021) treats health policy as one of eight concepts that cross the ten domains, with competencies in population health and systems-based practice that call on advanced-level nurses to advocate for and help develop policy. Each course outcome below is linked to a program outcome from Part 1, to the domains it develops and to the assignment that measures it.

Required Readings

Readings include the policy concept and domain sections of the Essentials, current peer-reviewed articles on rural workforce and access policy and primary sources: the text of the federal conditions of participation for critical access hospitals, the student's state nurse practice act and selected legislative and regulatory documents. Two articles anchor the first half of the course. Metzger (2026) makes the case that Medicare's federal rules for small rural hospitals have not kept pace with the rural workforce: nurse practitioners now staff many of these hospitals, yet only physicians may provide the required medical direction, a limit Metzger links to added cost and administrative burden with no evidence that it improves care. Students read it as a model of a regulatory argument built from workforce trends and federal text. Miller and Barut (2026), writing from a Doctor of Nursing Practice project in Tennessee, report how nurse practitioners there view full practice authority, giving students a look at how practicing clinicians experience a restriction that policy documents describe in the abstract. Together they show students that policy analysis starts with evidence and ends with a position.

Schedule

The schedule gives the hardest reading, the federal rule text, to Week 4, after students have spent three weeks learning how such rules are made and why they matter, and it saves the faith reflection for the last week so that students reflect on the advocacy they have just practiced rather than on advocacy in the abstract. The schedule builds toward the policy brief: students choose a problem in Week 2, analyze a regulation in Week 4, identify who must be persuaded in Week 5 and write the brief in Week 7, so each assignment becomes material for the next.

Assignments

The regulatory analysis paper asks students to pick a single statute or regulation now in force that shapes rural health care, such as the conditions of participation for critical access hospitals or a scope of practice restriction, and to evaluate its purpose, evidence base, effects on access and quality and options for change. For the stakeholder map, students chart everyone who gains or loses if their chosen problem is addressed, from hospital boards and medical staffs to county officials and patient groups, along with each party's likely position and the kind of evidence that would move it. The policy brief, the course's main assignment, is a two-page brief addressed to a real decision maker, such as a state legislator, a hospital board or a health department director, and is presented in the final seminar. The reflection paper asks students to examine their own calling to advocacy in light of Scripture and the profession's code of ethics.

Rubric Excerpt: Policy Brief

The rubric measures Course Outcome 4 directly, and the problem and evidence criteria also capture Course Outcome 2. The full rubric adds criteria for feasibility and for writing quality, and faculty calibrate their scoring each term by grading two sample briefs together before grading student work, so that the rubric data are consistent enough to use in program evaluation.

Teaching Strategies

The course is online and asynchronous for most of its work, which suits students who are working nurses spread across a mountainous region, but four synchronous seminars give it the live debate that policy learning needs. Each seminar has a defined task rather than an open discussion. In the first, students present the problem they have chosen and receive questions from peers and faculty. In the second, they defend a reading of the federal rule they are analyzing, with one student assigned to argue the other side. In the third, they exchange brief outlines and give structured peer review. In the fourth, they present their briefs to a panel that includes a member of the partner council, a nurse leader from a critical access hospital and, when available, a state legislative staff member. The panel format makes the audience criterion of the rubric real: students learn whether a decision maker would read past the first paragraph.

Weekly discussions use cases from the region rather than general prompts. In Week 3, for example, students consider a rural clinic that cannot hire a physician to supervise its nurse practitioners and must decide whether to close a satellite site, which brings scope of practice regulation down to a decision a nurse leader might face. Faculty participate in discussions to push students from opinion to evidence, asking in each thread what the data show and who would disagree.

Course Policies

Late work loses five percent per day for up to five days, after which it is not accepted without an approved extension; extensions are granted for documented illness, family emergencies and urgent work demands, which are common for nurse leaders in small organizations. All written work is submitted through the plagiarism detection tool, and students may consult the university writing center before submitting the regulatory analysis and the brief. Students may draw on their own organizations' policies and data with permission, but must remove any information that identifies patients or employees. Accommodations are arranged through the university's office for disability services.

Assessing Political Competence

Grades show whether students completed assignments well, but the program also needs evidence that students' political competence grew. Volkert et al. (2026) adapted the Political Competence Scale for Nurses for graduate nursing education and found strong content validity across its four subscales of political knowledge, efficacy, interaction and activity, with an overall scale content validity index of 0.92. Students will complete the adapted scale in Week 1 and Week 8, and the results, reported for the group rather than for individuals, will feed the program evaluation.

Connections to Other Courses

RHSL 815 is placed in the first spring so that it can draw on the population assessment students completed in RHSL 801 and feed the project they begin defining in the first summer. Students are encouraged, though not required, to choose a policy problem related to their emerging project, so that the regulatory analysis becomes part of the project's background and the stakeholder map identifies people the student will later need as project partners. RHSL 810, taken in the same term, teaches evidence appraisal, and the two courses share one assignment deadline: the evidence table a student builds in RHSL 810 can supply the evidence section of the policy brief. Coordinating the two courses in this way reduces the workload for working students and shows them that policy and evidence are parts of the same leadership task. Later, in RHSL 835, students return to the reflection paper from this course as the starting point for a personal leadership plan, which closes the loop on Course Outcome 5.

How the Course Carries the Framework

The course's primary thread is systems leadership, because policy and regulation are the systems within which rural organizations operate. Its secondary thread, rural populations, enters through the problems students analyze and the communities their briefs serve. Pittman et al. (2026) recommend that faculty complete a gap analysis to confirm that courses actually cover the Essentials competencies they claim, and this syllabus will be included in our program's gap analysis with the outcome table above as its evidence.

A Biblical Perspective on Advocacy

"Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Isaiah 1:17). The prophet's verbs are active: learn, seek, correct, bring, plead. Advocacy in this sense is a skill to be learned and a task to be done, not only a feeling of concern, which is why the course teaches it through graded work. Rural communities that have lost a hospital unit rarely have a lobbyist; a nurse leader who can write a clear brief may be the voice the proverb asks for. The reflection paper invites students to consider that calling seriously.

Conclusion

RHSL 815 turns Program Outcome 6 into five measurable course outcomes, each linked to the Essentials and to a graded assignment, and it gives students the tools to analyze and influence the rules that shape rural care. The pre-post measure of political competence and the policy brief rubric give the program evidence it can use. Building this one course in full also tested the curriculum from Part 1. The group found that Program Outcome 6 could be reached in a single course only because RHSL 801 prepares students to describe a rural population's needs, which confirmed the order of the degree plan, and that the advocacy outcome needs the partner council's help to give students real audiences. Part 3 will place this course within a projected evaluation of the whole curriculum.

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.

Metzger, S. L. (2026). Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services staffing regulations in critical access hospitals: Implications for nurse practitioner practice and rural care access. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/JXX.0000000000001323

Miller, M. D., & Barut, J. C. (2026). Attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs related to full practice authority for advanced practice registered nurses. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, 38(10), 837-846. https://doi.org/10.1097/JXX.0000000000001315

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

Volkert, D., McKinley Yoder, C., Robinson, L., Johnston, H., & Goar, A. (2026). Content validation of a political competence scale in graduate nursing education. Nursing Education Perspectives. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001603