Nurses and therapists keep clashing over one patient's permitted mobility, and an NU512 Unit 5 case traces that clash through D'Amour's collaboration model and AHRQ's TeamSTEPPS. Searches like "nu 512 unit 5 assignment example", "nu512 unit 5 sample" and "nu512 unit 5 example" land here.
Two Records, Two Measures, No Owner: An Interprofessional Conflict Case on Mobility Status at Night in a Rehabilitation Unit
[Student Name]
Purdue University Global
NU512: Leadership, Organizational Theory, and Behavior
Unit 5 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The week, the patient and both professions' positions are composite; the collaboration model and evidence cited are published.
The Case
Mr. W., 71, is on the unit after a left-sided stroke. On Tuesday afternoon, his physical therapist clears him for toilet transfers with supervision of one person and a gait belt, and documents that in her treatment note. On Wednesday night at 0230, he calls to use the bathroom. The night nurse finds his care plan still listing him as a two-person assist with a bed alarm, as it had since admission. With one nursing assistant for twelve patients and another patient in pain, she offers a urinal, sets the bed alarm and reassures him. On Thursday morning, the therapist finds him frustrated, reporting that he "was not allowed" to walk to the bathroom, and writes to the heads of both departments: nights keep patients in bed and undo therapy's progress. By Thursday afternoon, the charge nurses have heard about it from both sides.
Two Positions, Each in Its Strongest Form
Therapy's position. We spend three hours a day building function, and walking to the toilet is one of the most important functional goals for a patient going home. Every night that a cleared patient is kept in bed with a urinal, he loses practice, confidence and dignity, and we see it in his mobility scores. The information was documented clearly in the record on Tuesday. Nurses should read therapy notes, and when we clear a patient, the unit should act on it.
Nursing's position. At 0230, a nurse is responsible for twelve patients' safety with one assistant. The care plan she works from says two-person assist, because no one changed it. She cannot search therapy notes for every patient each night, and a transfer status that exists only in a therapy note is invisible at the bedside. If Mr. W. falls, it is nursing that will be asked why a fall-risk patient was walked to the bathroom with too little help. Keeping him safe was the right call on the information she had.
Both positions are reasonable. Each profession would sign its own paragraph.
Why It Went to Two Directors
The escalation itself is data. The therapist wrote to two managers in two chains because there is no single person who can resolve a dispute between a nurse and a therapist on this unit. Each director can speak only for her own staff. In practice, each will investigate, each will find that her own staff member acted reasonably on the information she had, and the matter will close without anything changing. The unit has seen [four] similar escalations in the past year, and the record of each ends the same way. A recurring conflict that is resolved each time and never fixed is a sign that the unit lacks a place where the two professions' work meets.
Diagnosis Through D'Amour's Model
D'Amour et al. (2008) describe interprofessional collaboration along four dimensions: shared goals and vision, internalization, formalization and governance. Each points to a different part of the problem.
Shared goals and vision. Weak. The two professions are measured on different numbers. Nursing's unit reports falls per thousand patient days, drawn from the national nursing quality database; therapy is judged on functional gain on the Section GG mobility and self-care items of the rehabilitation assessment. Each profession is doing what its own measure rewards, and the measures pull in opposite directions at 0230.
Internalization. Low. Internalization, in the model, is professionals' awareness of their interdependence and mutual trust. Day therapists and night nurses almost never meet; the trust network mapped in Unit 2 showed almost no trust ties between the professions.
Formalization. Thin. Mobility status lives in a therapy treatment note; fall precautions and assist levels live in the nursing care plan. No rule says who updates which, or when, when therapy clears a patient.
Governance. Absent. No person or group owns the question of a patient's current mobility status across both records. That is the finding this analysis weights most, because it explains why the argument recurs: without an owner, every incident is resolved between two people and then repeats with the next pair.
What TeamSTEPPS Did and Did Not Do
The unit completed TeamSTEPPS training last year, and it helped in one respect. The TeamSTEPPS program teaches tools for mutual support and communication, including a structured way of voicing a safety concern (King et al., 2008). That Wednesday night, when the nursing assistant suggested walking Mr. W. anyway, the nurse used that language to explain her safety concern, and the assistant accepted it. The tool settled that night's disagreement quickly. But it could not settle the recurring dispute, because the problem was not how individuals spoke to each other; it was that the information each needed was in the other's record and the measures each answered to disagreed. Communication tools work within a structure; they do not replace one.
What the Evidence Suggests
When Cochrane reviewers looked for trials of interventions that build collaboration into everyday practice, they found nine, and the evidence was mostly of low certainty; one finding was that externally facilitated interprofessional activities may slightly improve functional status in patients after stroke (Reeves et al., 2017). The review offers no single tested solution for this unit, but it supports the direction of the remedies below: structured, joint processes rather than training alone.
Remedies, by Dimension
Governance first: assign ownership of each patient's mobility status to a named pair, the patient's primary therapist and the day charge nurse, who together update a single mobility status each afternoon before 1500.
Formalization: display that single status at the bedside and in one field of the record that both professions see, replacing the separate therapy note and care plan entries for assist level.
Shared goals: report a joint measure to both directors, the share of patients whose bedside mobility status matches their latest therapy clearance, alongside falls and functional gain.
Internalization: a monthly joint case review with night nurses and therapists, fifteen minutes, on one patient each time.
None of these remedies requires either profession to give up its measure or its judgment. Each gives the two a shared place to meet, and each can be tested within a month by checking how many cleared patients were still listed as two-person assists at night.
References
D'Amour, D., Goulet, L., Labadie, J.-F., MartÃn-Rodriguez, L. S., & Pineault, R. (2008). A model and typology of collaboration between professionals in healthcare organizations. BMC Health Services Research, 8, 188. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-8-188
King, H. B., Battles, J., Baker, D. P., Alonso, A., Salas, E., Webster, J., Toomey, L., & Salisbury, M. (2008). TeamSTEPPS: Team strategies and tools to enhance performance and patient safety. In K. Henriksen, J. B. Battles, M. A. Keyes, & M. L. Grady (Eds.), Advances in patient safety: New directions and alternative approaches (Vol. 3). Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Reeves, S., Pelone, F., Harrison, R., Goldman, J., & Zwarenstein, M. (2017). Interprofessional collaboration to improve professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2017(6), CD000072. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000072.pub3
How this NU512 Unit 5 example is structured
Blame is excluded early. The case section reports behavior in both professions without judging it, and the positions section gives each side its strongest version. Diagnosis follows D'Amour's dimensions in order. Shared goals are weak because each profession is judged on a different number: falls per thousand patient days for nursing, functional gain on the Section GG mobility items for therapy. Internalization is low because day therapists and night nurses rarely meet. Formalization is thin, since mobility status lives in a therapy note while fall precautions live in a nursing care plan. Governance has no owner, the finding the paper weights most. TeamSTEPPS is placed carefully: its mutual support tools resolve a moment, as the case shows, but a disagreement generated daily by structure returns however well each conversation goes. Recommendations address the structure: one status field, one joint report and a shared owner.
Get an NU512 Unit 5 example written to your instructions
A recurring disagreement between your profession and another is the starting point. Outline it in a few sentences, keep people anonymous, and attach the Unit 5 prompt and rubric. Within 24-48h a model case comes back that analyzes the structure behind the dispute; the first one costs nothing. Analyzing the dispute on your own unit is the part left to you. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Purdue University Global document.
NU512 Unit 5 questions, answered
Is TeamSTEPPS enough as the only framework?
Rarely, for this assignment. TeamSTEPPS supplies communication tools, such as CUS, the two-challenge rule and the DESC script, and it helps describe how a single conversation went. It is not built to explain why a conflict keeps recurring. Pairing it with a model of collaboration or conflict, as the sample does with D'Amour, lets the paper explain both the moment and its cause.
What if the other profession really is at fault?
Describe the behavior accurately and then ask what produces it. Even a genuinely unhelpful pattern tends to have a structural source: a measure, a schedule, a missing handoff. The sample never excuses behavior, but it treats each side's conduct as a reasonable response to how its work is organized. That approach earns more credit in most grading and leads to recommendations that can work.
Can the conflict involve physicians?
Yes, and many strong papers do. Disagreements with physicians over orders, call-backs or rounding times are common choices. The same rules apply: roles instead of names, both positions stated fairly, and attention to the structure, such as separate reporting lines or rival measures. Take care that nothing in the case identifies a particular physician or service at your facility.