Nursing Care Paper as a Writing Intensive Requirement in Clinical Nursing Courses

Writing has been identified as a requisite skill for nursing practice by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, yet the literature indicated poor writing skills on the part of nursing students and few writing interventions to address the problem. This article aims to describe a structured writing assignment called Nursing Care Paper (NCP) that is designed to meet requirements for designated writing-intensive clinical nursing courses. The NCP consists of low-stakes, weekly reflection paper assignments and a high-stakes case report assignment based on anonymized data obtained by the student while taking care of a patient. The NCP case report is scaffolded and sequenced according to the nursing process framework and supported by ongoing post-conference workshops. Pilot implementation, design considerations, benefits, challenges, and student feedback were discussed in detail. The NCP is a thoughtfully crafted writing assignment that can be customized to meet the objectives of any clinical nursing course.