Nursing Practicum and Capstone
Practicum
The purpose of the practicum’s individualized learning experience is to enable you to develop an original comprehensive quality improvement project on a topic of professional or personal interest. Your project design should focus on the quality improvement of a process, policy, or procedure. The practicum is project-based and during the practicum, you will focus on an issue, and then develop and implement a quality improvement initiative that is a substantial original applied project of your authorship. This course requires inter-professional collaboration with disciplines outside of nursing and nursing practicum experience within a practice environment and must include inter-professional collaboration. The nursing education, forensic nursing, and public health nursing specialization tracks must include a minimum of 20 hours of direct-care experience which may include direct patient education.
Capstone
The purpose of the Capstone course is to create a written explanation of your Practicum Project and offer you the opportunity to describe your Practicum Project in detail. You may enroll in the Capstone course after you have completed all other courses within the MSN curriculum and Practicum courses. The capstone project will include five Chapters, utilize a minimum of 35 sources, and an overall length of 30 written pages excluding the title, abstract, references, and appendices pages.
The following sections should be included in your Capstone:
- Title page
- Abstract
- Table of Contents
- Chapter 1 - Introduction (Background, Significance, Justification, Purpose)
- Chapter 2 - Literature Review
- Chapter 3 - Method (as appropriate for your project---may include project design, procedures, evaluation methods, etc.)
- Chapter 4 - Discussion of Findings and Recommendations
- Chapter 5 - Conclusion
- References
- Appendices, as appropriate
Throughout the Capstone course, you will need to submit iterations of the chapter sections as you complete them to your Capstone Instructor for feedback. The Oral Presentation of your Capstone should be about 30 minutes and will be facilitated via synchronous telecommunication such as video conferencing media.