Professional Context
Master’s-level nurses need to be able to think beyond the bedside. It is important to be able to research, synthesize, and apply evidence that will result in improved health outcomes for the communities and populations that are part of your care setting. Improving outcomes at a community or population level, even incrementally, can create noticeable and significant aggregate health improvements across all of a care setting’s patients.

Scenario
Your organization has created an initiative to improve one of the pervasive and chronic health concerns in the community. Some examples of possibilities for health improvement initiatives are nationwide concerns, such as type 2 diabetes, HIV, obesity, and the Zika virus. However, your organization wants you to identify the health concern that is most appropriate to address for the community in your practice environment. You will need to do your own research to gather and evaluate the relevant data for your chosen issue.

Instructions
The bullet points below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Be sure that your population health improvement plan addresses all of the bullets below, at a minimum.

-Evaluate the environmental and epidemiological data about your community so that you can illustrate and diagnose widespread population health issues.
-Develop an ethical health improvement plan that addresses the population health issue you have identified in your evaluation.
The plan should be based upon the best available evidence and meet the cultural and environmental needs of your community.
-Justify the value and relevance of the evidence you used as the basis for your population health improvement plan.
-Propose criteria that can be used to evaluate the achievement of your health improvement plan’s outcomes.
-Explain how you plan to apply strategies for communicating with community members and colleagues in the health care professionals in an ethical, culturally sensitive, and inclusive way about the development and implementation of your health improvement plan.
-Integrate relevant sources to support assertions, correctly formatting citations and references using APA style.