Assignment: A Whooping Cough Outbreak
Assignment: A Whooping Cough Outbreak
Scenario
Acting as the president of a local hospital in an economical and socially deprived county in the US, you have just received a phone call from the state’s CDC office advising the hospital of an outbreak of Whooping Cough. As of now, a majority of the state is being affected by the outbreak and resources are becoming scarce. Your hospital is the only medical center that serves the county. Based on trends and tracking, the CDC believes that your county in which can expect a major increase in patients in the next 48-72 hours with the disease. As the president of the 300-bed hospital which serves a diverse population of 50,000 citizens, it is the president’s responsibility to create a plan of action to help address and treat patients of the county who might become ill in the next 48-72 hours.
The first task you will undertake is to research the disease, its course of treatments, and cures to help effectively treat the potential outbreak. Once you have done so, you will create a presentation that you can give to the county board and CDC showing how your hospital will combat the disease, treat patients, and develop strategies to prevent the spread of the outbreak.
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As the president, you will need to work with internal and external vendors on ensuring that the hospital has enough resources and that more resources can be ordered and delivered as quickly as possible. You will need to reach out to and gain assistance from other healthcare organizations in the area to help you track, treat, and control the spread of the disease. As the leader of the hospital, you will have to make decisions on how to properly manage the shortage of beds, doctors and nurses, and resources that may occur due to the outbreak.
Instructions
Create an executive summary addressing how best to successfully manage the problem outlined in the scenario. This plan has two parts. First is the executive summary followed by a PowerPoint presentation with audio.
Step 1 – Write an Executive Summary covering the following:
Develop an action plan to share with the hospital staff and CDC local office to address and contain the outbreak in an effective and efficient manner at the hospital.
Outline the process of developing alliances and partnerships to help treat and contain the outbreak through the use of efficient and effective approaches to the healthcare delivery systems.
Analyze the organizational decisions needed to be undertaken as a leader; that would play a part in addressing and containing the outbreak along with the use of limited resources.
Determine the best leadership style to use to effectively bring together multiple departments and agencies to work together as one team in containing and treating the outbreak.
Summarize innovative processes needed to address the outbreak given the shortage of resources and time to implement a strategy.
Outline any ethical considerations that should be addressed as part of the strategy in treating and containing the outbreak due to the shortage of resources such as money, manpower, and medicine.
Write a conclusion on the process changes needed to help improve reaction time and containment from the standpoint of the hospital.
Step 2 – Create a PowerPoint presentation with audio
As president of the hospital, you will need to create and record a 5-minute presentation using PowerPoint made up of at least 12 slides covering your findings and suggestions in dealing with the outbreak and containment of the disease. The presentation will be presented to local health officials including the officials from the counties identified by the CDC. Therefore, the style of the presentation needs to be formal. Use the Screencast-O-Matic to record your presentation. (Please send audio link seperately along with the link).
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. Assignment: A Whooping Cough Outbreak
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS
Discussion Questions (DQ)
- Initial responses to the DQ should address all components of the questions asked, include a minimum of one scholarly source, and be at least 250 words.
- Successful responses are substantive (i.e., add something new to the discussion, engage others in the discussion, well-developed idea) and include at least one scholarly source.
- One or two sentence responses, simple statements of agreement or “good post,” and responses that are off-topic will not count as substantive. Substantive responses should be at least 150 words.
- I encourage you to incorporate the readings from the week (as applicable) into your responses.
Weekly Participation
- Your initial responses to the mandatory DQ do not count toward participation and are graded separately.
- In addition to the DQ responses, you must post at least one reply to peers (or me) on three separate days, for a total of three replies.
- Participation posts do not require a scholarly source/citation (unless you cite someone else’s work).
- Part of your weekly participation includes viewing the weekly announcement and attesting to watching it in the comments. These announcements are made to ensure you understand everything that is due during the week.
APA Format and Writing Quality
- Familiarize yourself with APA format and practice using it correctly. It is used for most writing assignments for your degree. Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for APA paper templates, citation examples, tips, etc. Points will be deducted for poor use of APA format or absence of APA format (if required).
- Cite all sources of information! When in doubt, cite the source. Paraphrasing also requires a citation.
- I highly recommend using the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition.
Use of Direct Quotes
- I discourage overutilization of direct quotes in DQs and assignments at the Masters’ level and deduct points accordingly.
- As Masters’ level students, it is important that you be able to critically analyze and interpret information from journal articles and other resources. Simply restating someone else’s words does not demonstrate an understanding of the content or critical analysis of the content.
- It is best to paraphrase content and cite your source.
LopesWrite Policy
- For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
- Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
- Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
- Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.
Late Policy
- The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
- Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
- If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
- I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
- As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.
Communication
- Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
- Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
- Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.
Assignment: A Whooping Cough Outbreak
