INTRODUCTION

As an advanced practice nurse, it is important to diagnose, treat, and evaluate patients who have chronic disease. A nurse must understand how pathology, treatment, regimens, and psycho-social issues affect patients and the care they receive. Disease management is more than just monitoring a medication or treatment; it is evaluating the disease process from the micro to macro level. As a nurse with an advanced degree, you will be expected to assess patients and individual and population responses to chronic illness.

For this assessment, you will investigate pathopharmacological issues related to a specific disease process. You may choose to investigate traumatic brain injury, depression, obesity, asthma, or heart failure. As part of this assessment, you will analyze the various impacts the disease process has on the patients, their families, and populations at a local, national, and international level.

REQUIREMENTS

Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. An originality report is provided when you submit your task that can be used as a guide.

Professional s is a required aspect to pass this task. Completion of a spell check and grammar check prior to submitting your final work is strongly recommended.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

A. Investigate one of the following disease processes: traumatic brain injury, depression, obesity, asthma, or heart failure.

1. Analyze the pathophysiology of the disease process you selected in part A.

2. Discuss the standard of practice for the selected disease process.

a. Discuss the evidence-based pharmacological treatments in your state and how they affect management of the selected disease in your community.

b. Discuss clinical guidelines for assessment, diagnosis, and patient education for the selected disease process.

c. Compare the standard practice for managing the disease within your community with state or national practices.

3. Discuss characteristics of and resources for a patient who manages the selected disease well, including access to care, treatment options, life expectancy, and outcomes.

a. Analyze disparities between management of the selected disease on a national and international level.

4. Discuss three or four factors (e.g., financial resources, access to care, insured/uninsured, Medicare/Medicaid) that contribute to a patient being able to manage the selected disease.

a. Explain how a lack of the factors discussed in part A4 leads to an unmanaged disease process.

i. Describe characteristics of a patient with the selected disease that is unmanaged.

B. Analyze how the selected disease process affects patients, families, and populations in your community.

1. Discuss the financial costs associated with the selected disease process for patients, families, and populations from diagnosis to treatment.

C. Discuss how you will promote best practices for managing the selected disease in your current healthcare organization.

1. Discuss three strategies you could use to implement best practices for managing the selected disease in your current healthcare organization.

2. Discuss an appropriate method to evaluate the implementation of each of the strategies from part C1.