Public Health Concerns Advocacy Letter

Faculty Assignment Guidelines & Scoring Rubric

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to provide an opportunity for students to apply and disseminate information based on the status of public health policies and practices designed to address important public health problems, concerns and implications for nursing practice. The learning goals for this activity are:

· Identify and explain one issue area of national concern.

· Describe population-level statistics that describe the problem.

· Increase skills for influential writing around public health issues.

· Increase skills for advocacy activities.

Requirements:
Through this assignment, the student will

Write a letter to their legislator (House of Representatives or Senator) on a public health topic. The student will state relevant statistics in the area, indicate how this issue is affecting nursing practice and describe the action the student would like the legislator to take in regards to a current bill, or in support of the issue. (COs 1, 2 and 8)

Preparing the letter
You are going to prepare a letter to your Representative or Senator on a public health issue/topic. You are going to ask your legislator to take some sort of action on the issue (you do not have to send it to the legislator unless you so choose). Here are the steps for the letter and what I am looking for in these sections.

Steps for researching your topic

Step 1: Pick one of the following public health concerns as identified by the ANA or CDC. For more information and search for your topic. The topics are:

ANA topics:

https://ana.aristotle.com/SitePages/issues.aspx

CDC topics

https://www.cdc.gov/publichealthgateway/strategy/index.html

Step 2: Identify two key statistics about the public health issue that speaks to its importance. This could be something like “53% of women are exposed to violence during pregnancy” or something like that.

Step 3: Determine who is being affected by this issue – i.e. what type of population (age? Gender? Race/ethnicity? Occupations?)

Step 4: Research using nursing association, public health association websites about how this affects nurses.

Steps for the letter:

Step 1: Identify your representative using https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members

Choose either your representative or Senator to address your letter.

Step 2: Go that legislator’s websites, and research issues they are involved in. This will help identify their current stance on the issue you are addressing.

Step 3: Draft your letter in a Word Document. Address the following sections:

· State the purpose of your letter.

· State your identify as a student nurse, and your address.

· Provide the rationale for why this issue is important. Include the background research you conducted on the issue, very briefly. Include the 2 statistics you found.

· Identify why this issue is of importance to nursing.

· Identify a solution to the issue, and ask the legislator to support this solution. (The solution should be realistic, such as supporting future legislation to do xyz. Something like “put $15 billion towards this issue” is not very realistic. If you need any help with this, please let me know.

Best Practices in Preparing the Paper

Utilize resources available to you to assist with finding appropriate literature and articles from professional nursing journals relevant to your topic and preparing for and writing the paper. The letter does not have to be in APA format, but please cite in your assignment the website where your statistics are taken from. Language in the letter should be courteous. Proper spelling and grammar are required.

Letter sections:

Letter should be a minimum 500 words, maximum 1,000 words.

Points

Purpose and Identify (includes correct identification of the legislator based on address)

5

Background

• Two statistics

Affected population

20

Request of legislator:

· Solution identified and is realistic

Grammar/spelling:

· Proper grammar and mechanics

· Correct spelling

· websites or resources for statistics

· word count.

10

5

Total

A quality assignment will meet or exceed all

of the above requirements.