Lewis Healthcare Systems Leadership MSN

The 300-hour capstone practicum

NURS 59600 is a field experience: you implement and disseminate the project you planned in NURS 59200, with 300 clock hours of practicum. It is the only HSL course with printed hours, so your whole practicum rests on one organization and one leader.

Ask about timing early. The catalog places the HSL specialty courses in 8-week sessions. If your NURS 59600 section follows that pattern, 300 hours across eight weeks comes to about 37.5 hours a week by our arithmetic, close to a second full-time job. Ask the HSL track coordinator how the capstone hours are scheduled across the session before you commit to a site's calendar, and before you agree on time off with your employer.

Because Part 1 is where the plan takes shape, the site should be settled before NURS 59200 starts, not during it. A project written for an organization that later declines leaves you rewriting the plan in the middle of the capstone.

Using the MSN core to scope your capstone

The core courses give you the tools the capstone draws on. NURS 51700 Health in All Policy (HiAP) and NURS 55900 Applied Biostatistics and Epidemiology come first, NURS 53300 Scholarly Inquiry follows them, and NURS 53400 Dynamics of Population Health, NURS 53600 Healthcare Informatics and NURS 73500 Transformational Leadership for Healthcare round out the 18 credits (MSN/MBA students skip NURS 53600).

Students who settle on a capstone topic early can point their core assignments toward it: a literature review in scholarly inquiry, a data question in biostatistics, a change plan in transformational leadership. By the time NURS 59200 begins, the problem, the evidence and the likely host organization are already clear, and the site conversation becomes a request to implement rather than a request to explore. This is our planning advice, not a Lewis requirement; your course faculty set each assignment.

What makes a strong capstone setting

Lewis publishes no preceptor criteria for HSL, so these are the qualities we look for when matching a leadership capstone; your faculty make the final call.

• A nurse leader or executive with authority over the area your project touches, willing to mentor you for all 300 hours
• A problem the organization already wants solved, so staff time and data access follow naturally
• A timeline that fits your session, including any onboarding the organization requires of students
• A way to share results, since the course title includes dissemination: a presentation, report or poster the organization will host

Many HSL students work in health systems and look first at their own employer. Lewis publishes no rule on that, and clinicals where you work covers what to clarify. A different department within your own system is often a better fit than your home unit, where your staff role and your student role blur.