Western Governors University - BS Nursing

Western Governors University's (WGU) BS Nursing program is a highly credible and well-recognized academic degree in the U.S. and outside it.

There are quite a few strengths of the program making it a highly credible pick by the certified nurses who want to move on to the next level: B.S. Nursing.

The standard completion time for this online course is 18 months in which the candidate has to cover quite a few time-bound tasks, projects, and activities that add up to their passing score. You can find all the details of this program here.

The purpose of this post is NOT to promote the WGU's BS Nursing program. No way! I write this post only to let you know that, EXCEPT FOR HARD/NATURAL SCIENCES TASKS, I can provide assistance in all the tasks for this program since this is my job to help out students in their time of difficulty while pursuing an academic goal in the middle of their professional and home-based responsibilities.

So, I would give you a brief overview about some of the major tasks required to complete in this program.

The degree is divided in quite a few sections/subdomains of health care and nursing, and each section covers subjects from basic calculus to literature, from evidence-based practice to community health nursing, etc. Major breakdown of the program falls into the following subdomains.

1. Professional development
2. Quality and safety
3. Evidence-based practice
4. Applied leadership
5. Community and population health

Under each of these subject areas, there are quite a few tasks and activities that involve fieldwork, research, collaboration, synthesis, and writing. The overall focus of the degree program, thus, is to develop in the nurse the professional skills and competencies that can help them play an active role at different levels in the health care sector.

If we look at the academic subdomain, Evidence-based practice, there are quite a few writing tasks that help the professional to nurture hardcore skills to play with evidence-based nursing. Evidence-based nursing has now become part of professional nursing, and so, the nurse has to consult available evidence with regards to a health care concern/issue needed for careful decision making.

WGU's EBP is particularly known for developing advanced-level skills for EBP in their students. The reason is that the subdomain enables the nurse to differentiate between different types of literature available in the current health care knowledgebase: 

• Primary research
• Secondary research
• Evidence guidelines
• Evidence summary
• Meta-analysis
• Synthesis of different types of evidence

and so on. Moreover, EBP also requires the nurse to carry out tasks that are field-based, i.e., the professional has to connect the literature search, review, and synthesis to the health care context they are either employed at or has knowledge of.

The end-result of covering the EBP is that the candidate gets away with a bundle of cutting-edge skills in EBP.

Community and Population Health Nursing is the most challenging yet exciting subdomain of BSN at WGU. Challenging because the professional has to carry out very rigorous activities by being part of a community (usually the ones they live in), and by applying the principles of community health nursing in that community to bring about a positive change.


C228 - Community Health Nursing – Task 1

For example, one of the tasks in this domain is Application of Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing, a lengthy write-up around 20 pages. Activities in the task involve applying quite a few tools to identify a community and understand the major health concerns the community faces. This is a field project. There are six mandatory tools needed of the researching nurse (You) to apply to his/her selected context and discuss the application in the main document. These are:

1. Population Economic Status Survey
2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
3. Cultural Assessment Tool
4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
5. Windshield Survey
6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 

There are quite a lot of documents, guides, and links that accompany this task. The details required to carry out each of these six tools are clearly given in these accompanying resources. However, putting them all together in this task requires advance writing and synthesis skills. To make things easy for you, I discuss each of these six tools below giving you the insider's view, i.e., the approach by which you can have your task passed.

1. Population Economic Status Survey
PESS tool is actually a comprehensive approach taken by the nurse while working in the community to objectively understand the major health concerns faced by the community. The rationale for this tool, provided by the WGU, is that it helps the nurse to understand a health concern and argue her position in order to address the issue in favor of her community.

To cut short, the nurse has to dig deeper into major databases at the state and federal levels, i.e., American Fact Finer, City-Data.Com, Census.Gov, Healthy People 2020, etc. Alongside, she has to visit the local community centers such as the City Council, Health Department, non-profit organizations, and so on.

At the end of this exercise of information gathering, the nurse is able to understand the economic drivers at play in regards to the community's overall health status (the poor vs. the rich).

2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
NCSI is another tool to be applied in the community. It helps the nurse to understand the systemic level factors when it comes to her community's health status. This tool is to be filled up by observing and collecting data from community resources such as fire, police, emergency departments, disaster management to clearly understand the safety-related dynamics and to develop her inventory. Thus, you will have to visit the relevant departments to carry out this task which should involve formal/informal interviews and focus groups with the relevant staff; in addition, searching relevant databases over the Internet is part of the game here.

3. Cultural Assessment Tool
CAT clearly points us to the direction of understanding the racial/ethnic, gender, age-wise makeup of the community to help the nurse to better understand the dynamics of the present health concerns as spread over these domains. Understanding the role of culture is fundamental in community health nursing because it is well established in literature that different ethnic/cultural groups view epidemiology and treatment of a disease differently. For instance, a Hmong community member might possibly explain her epilepsy as a spirit taking her over.

This tool also requires you to search for data. However, it has a subjective element that requires you to meet different people and talk to them, interview them, and understand their viewpoint in relation to a health concern and its treatment. These two areas of investigation combine together to add another dimension to your community health nursing fieldwork.

4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
DA&PG, as the title suggests, is about understanding the many resources your community utilizes to combat a disaster, natural or otherwise. This takes you to survey the community's geography to find out its industry, terrain, etc. and to plan for a possible route to prevent a disaster from hitting the community. DA&PG also asks you to take note of such factors as weather patterns, cultural outlook, contagious diseases, the spread of a disease, etc. It also puts you to trace the local government's position on these variables. As soon as you start to cover the areas given in the tool, the picture of disaster assessment and any loopholes start to emerge for you to argue in favor of your community's health.

5. Windshield Survey
WS tool should have come in the beginning of this list because it is used (and expected by WGU to be used) in the beginning of your community health fieldwork. As the name suggests, this tool is to get the feel of the community through the bird's eye view. WGU's guide to WS states, "While driving through your community, stop for coffee or have lunch in a neighborhood".

Hence, your focus is to bear a holistic understanding of your community's overall feel and look that includes its housing, commercial buildings, open spaces, etc.

6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 
PHSH tool follows the footprints of the famous scavenger hunt game. However, in this task, it requires the nurse to choose six facilities from the long list given in the supplementary resource. So, logically, what you're doing here is a scavenger hunt for the community's health by going to these facilities and collecting information. But the approach is rigorous and systematic.

For example, you chose American Red Cross. Now, the hunt requires you to answer the 13 questions given in the same guide from "What is the organization's target population?" down to "What specific services does the organization provide?". At the end, thus, your knowledge of the community is immaculate and you become an expert nurse on that community! Wow, hats off to the WGU's curriculum planners, honestly!

This should be very clear from the tools mentioned that the task is highly beneficial for nurturing community health nursing skills and competencies.

The task discussed above is followed by Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing Practicum. This task is also quite long, around 25 pages, and requires applying the knowledge of the community's health profile (as obtained in the previous task) to address ONE specific health concern (e.g. obesity, cancer, influenza, etc.). For this, the candidate, once again, jumps on to the field and works with a number of community-based stakeholders to come up with a viable health care plan to address that health concern by taking into account the epidemiology and the prevention factors of the health concern.

The fieldwork requires a lot of activities from collecting reliable statistics to critiquing available resources and any loopholes. With these areas covered, the nurse then DEVELOPS effective and EFFICACIOUS interventions. The required number is two.

These interventions are well-planned. You will have to demonstrate every aspect of these interventions, i.e. how you would carry out these interventions, their estimated impact factor, and the objective evaluations of the outcome.

So this practicum is really killing in terms of the skills, deeper level understanding of community health nursing, and the relevant competencies you gain while doing it.

With this brief overview of the WGU's BSN, I would suggest that you should go ahead and get your hands dirty with the explosive knowledge and skills that the program has to offer. However, if you need any assistance anywhere in the program, coming to me will not be a bad idea.

Good luck! My email: meokhan2/at/gmail/dot/com

Good Academic Writing Is Like a Beautiful Face

Do you write as beautifully as a human face?

Good academic writing is as inspiring and refreshing as a human face. Human face is most probably one of the most proportionately beautiful creation of the Creator.

Good academic writing can be seen in the light of a human face that inspires, refreshes, and motivates us to move in the direction of perfection.

Take for example the human face without any cosmetics being used. What we have is equally distributed features from skull to the chin. We cannot deny the fact that including the brain and the eyes, most of human capabilities are found within the area of the face.

Good academic writing is essentially analogous to this beautifully created part of human body. Yes.

To further define my analogy, I would break down an academic work into its integral or required parts.

An academic work such as a research dissertation or a term paper consists of the most important portion called the abstract, executive summary, or thesis statement (yes, it is only in the few first line that the reader has to decide whether your effort is worth going through or not!).

It has to be carefully crafted. It does not need lofty language expression; does a human head look anything different from a human head? Absolutely not. More than the words, what counts is the clarity of your thought that ensures the work attracts attention. Good words are just like a good hair-dye and a hairstyle.

Next comes the body of your research work. It contains different chapters, sections, and paragraphs. Each one of it is proportionally connected to the other parts and contributes to the whole picture. From A to Z, from starting paragraph to the conclusion, each part has to fit in well just like the eyes, ears, nose, the lips and other minute facial features.

Unless each part is carefully crafted and garnished, it is difficult for the whole picture to emerge as something inspiring.

Other than language and its mechanics, it is important that the writer has the clarity in the thought they're trying to present. Clarity of thoughts alone makes up for the major part of your picture.

Most of the writers, contrarily and wrongly, try to beautify their writing with sophisticated words, expressions coupled with complex grammatical structure when their thought lacks clarity.

Once your thought is clear, your chapters, passages, paragraphs, and sentences connect to each other logically from the beginning to the end without requiring you to put any unnecessary efforts to cloud it with anything like not so common vocabulary.

Clarity of thought comes from the smaller parts just like the parts of a human face that has subtle details for the eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips, cheeks and what not.

The human face tells us that there it is created with so much at the background.

Thus, you need to clearly understand why you're doing what you're doing. It is always a better way to ask the three basic questions while doing any single activity on your academic writing: (i) what, (ii) why, and (iii) how.

Trust me once you've learned to address these three WHs above, you'll get clarity of the thought which would help you a great deal in forming the beautiful face of your work.

Last comes the role of cosmetics. What do cosmetics do to a human face? These are different substances used to care the human face - in simple terms cosmetics help enhance the beauty of the face.

Just like cosmetics, your presentation of your work enhances its overall appearance. It includes everything from typeface to line spacing, from margins to indentations, and so on.

As they say, the best cosmetics are the simplest ones. You must follow the simplest possible strategy toward your presentation. Simplicity is the best cosmetics. Choose most common formats for presenting your work

With clear thoughts you paint a beautiful picture; with good presentation you embellish the face of your research work that has every part defined with great and careful details.

Essay Writing Scam - the Do's and Don't's (Internet Companies)

This post covers the present-day scam trends in the essay writing industry. It also offers a few effective steps to avoid scam in the first place to save you money, time, and stress.

The most common form of scam has already been discussed in the previous post. This is a continuation of the same.

Here, I will cover the companies. In the next post, I will talk about freelance writers.

Today, as more and more people have access to the internet and communication technologies, business becomes riskier even though there are certain filters applied both at the physical and virtual level of all the transactions taking place over the WWW.

One reason for this growing fluidity  and porousness is the lack of global jurisdiction.

Therefore, today, it is more a matter of individual scrutiny and personal safety measures that one can take to avoid any possibility of being scammed. Within essay writing industry, there are certain Do's and Don't's that can safe you from a lot of unwanted stress.


DO's in the essay writing industry

1- Always do your research before hiring a writer or a company.

2- Google the name or brand by adding 'scam' to the term or name.

3- Always check the credibility of the website that returns results of some company you're looking for. Do not just think upfront that some company is a scam only because it has an unhappy customer. You need to dig deeper.

4- Do a WHOis record check to find out the registrant's address, age of the domain, and hosting server. It will give you a good idea of the company's physical presence. It will also help you verify facts presented on their website.

For instance, you can cross-check their claims (if any) with their domain age: We've been in business since 1999 versus Domain registration data 2008!

5- Try to read carefully the webcopy on the company's website. Does it really look professional? What about the overall look of the webpage?

6- If you're satisfied with these initial research, ALWAYS directly talk to the support via phone. Use a public phone if you don't want to leave your personal number with them. Talk to them, find out if they really sound LIKE a company.

Doing the DON'T's in the essay writing industry

1- If you're doing business with a company for the first time, NEVER reveal your institutional, personal, and other information that may be sensitive. Yes, playing safe is ALWAYS important in life especially over the internet. Personally identifiable information and its security are now becoming global phenomena.

2- Do NOT order a BIG paper, project, or task on the first go. Always start with a smaller paper. This will give you a better idea about the overall business model of that company.

If they are a scam company, their first product will show poor quality in terms of writing, research, formatting, citation style, and so on. Who knows, you may end up receiving a completely plagiarized paper altogether.

However, a legitimate company will provide a product par excellence.

3- DO NOT hesitate to ask the support of the company to keep you in contact with your writer. Knowing your writer PERSONALLY is always good for effective communication and better results.

4- Do NOT hesitate to ask for revisions or any other adjustments that you may find necessary to be done. Remember, you're evaluating the company on the way of becoming their loyal client.

ALWAYS keep in mind that all that glitters is not gold.

If you carry out these steps, I am sure you'll soon understand the differences between a reliable and scam essay writing companies.

Should you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate  to reach me. I would be happy to respond to your queries.

Happy writing!

The MOST Common Scam in the Essay Writing Industry

My years-long experience in the essay writing industry, my communication with a diverse range of people within the same industry, and my personal interaction with global clients and writers have all contributed to my understanding of the MOST common types of scam that affect both students and writers on a regular basis.

I must say that a majority of these scam incidents involve MONEY on the forefront of every transaction. Most often students are ripped off their hard-earned money by freelance writers and online essay writing companies.

A student googles or bings for online essay writing help. S/he comes across quite a few online resources and companies that guarantee a premium writing product for a reasonable price. The student places an order mainly for two reasons:

(1) They can pay via PayPal (assuming their funds would be secure in case of any disputes);
(2) The website design, contact details, and other relevant information make them believe they're the best option.

Now, let's demystify the PayPal-Secure-Payment myth.

PayPal DOES NOT guarantee, cover, or stand by you if you purchase a DIGITAL PRODUCT such as an e-book, music, template, and (in our case) academic essay! Wooh! User Agreement, and PayPal Community are quite useful resources on these matters. Have a look. The PayPal User Agreement explicitly states (clause 11.10) that, "Intangible items, licenses for digital content, and services" are NOT "eligible for PayPal seller protection".

Thus, today, virtual essay writing companies are swarming the WWW with an incessant speed because they have a countless number of potential clients - new students every semester looking for help!

What really happens is that a student places an order with an online writing company and receives either a plagiarized essay or something that is hardly to be regarded some standard writing - making it almost impossible for the student to acquire moderate grades!

The student, enraged and frustrated, contacts PayPal to initiate a chargeback only to learn that it is not possible. Read here about how to make relatively secure payments online.

Second, it is very likely that the company starts threatening the client to leak out their personal and institutional information to their school if they do not stop spreading word over the internet!

The bottom line - the student ends up feeling more frustrated and furious over all the happened to him or her. However, the learning has come for a much higher price: time, money, and most of all the educational career being jeopardized.

Most of these companies know their art of scamming their customers. They use fancy language and multimedia, attractive webpage design, and libelous claims like:

- They've been in business since 1998;
- All of their writers are PhDs;
- They guarantee highest possible grades for their writing products, and so on.

Although I am from Pakistan, I am NOT misrepresenting ANYTHING about me, my background, my language proficiency, etc.

Since it is my top priority to be honest in my business, I think the reader can tell whether I mean it or not.

I am sure this post has demystified the  notion of ONLINE PREMIUM help. Kindly, do look around before blindfoldedly believing in the claims made on a website.

I would be honored if I could be of any assistance to you. Do leave me a message.