Research Paper Guidelines
You have been hired as the vice president for operations for Intravalley Health. One of your first tasks is to educate the board of directors concerning the evolving nature of healthcare and how it impacts the health system.
Identify a professional or scholarly journal article that addresses a topic within one of these three broad areas:
- Change management, conflict resolution, strategic communication, preparedness, or crisis management in healthcare.
- Human resources specific to healthcare: physician relations, staff recruitment and retention, in-service training, policy-making and enforcement, counseling and professional development, credentialing, or unionization of professional staff.
- The patient experience and satisfaction surveys.
- Medical Tourism.
Access, review, and integrate the findings of the journal article into a 10-12 page analysis of your topic. Your exploration should include the background of the issue, relevant laws and regulations, and strategic and operational impacts on health services organizations.
The board of directors consists of preeminent social scientists, therefore your report should be delivered in APA format, including an abstract and references. The page count pertains to the body of the paper only.
Some administrative notes:
- There is a tendency to default to a hospital setting when considering issues in healthcare. You can examine other sectors such as long term care, palliative care, retail clinics, or community health centers. Make sure to position your paper from a managerial perspective.
- It is expected the depth of the research goes beyond your studies in the core courses (MSM students) or HCAD 600 (MSHCA students). Please review the policy for re-use of prior course work – even if it is your own.
- In order to provide a comprehensive assessment, the selected journal article should be supported (or refuted) by other scholarly sources.
- As you know from your Library Skills course, sources such as Time, Forbes, the Washington Post,and other newspapers, while often useful information resources, would not be appropriate for this paper. As a general guideline, if you can find the resource at a magazine stand, it probably is not a professional journal. The articles you choose should be recent (last 5 years) and should be primary rather than secondary. (Please see the APA manual if you do not recall the difference.)
