The purpose of the Discussion Board is to allow students to learn through sharing ideas and experiences as they relate to course content and the DB question. Because it is not possible to engage in two-way dialogue after a conversation has ended, no posts to the DB will be accepted after the end of each unit.

Create your hypothesis for your Individual Project in Unit 2 before completing this assignment.. Quantitative design should address the descriptive and the inferential statistical analysis that will be used to analyze the data. Qualitative design needs should define how the data will be organized, what trends will be looked at, and how differences and similarities will be identified.

• Explain the various means available to you for gathering data on the topic you have chosen.
• Explain at least 3 different means of collecting appropriate data and how you would analyze it.
• What challenges exist when collecting quantitative data?
• What challenges exist when collecting qualitative data?

Suggestions for Responding to Peer Posts

• Compare your peers’ description of the methods of gathering data to your own. Was there anything missing from their explanations, or from your own?
• How would you address some of the challenges your peers raised when gathering quantitative and qualitative data?

Grading Criteria
Response to discussion questions	80%
Response to peer posts (minimum of 2)	15%
APA citations and references (where applicable/peer posts)	5%

The wise food-critic works hard all day and
all night

and today, she’s arriving to see our small, new
joint.

Smelling bitter gouda, will she fancythe new

pungent cheese?Should she taste the delicate soups that

we have boiled for such a long, long exhausting time?

Because she influences all the frequent guests that

we still want to receive.

With each hour and every passing minute, taking a deep

breath and exhaling in and out, she comes into

my restaurant. Happy and with such enthusiasm.

Drinking wine and munching on flatbread, she
flashes

a large beaming grin at me. A good night to
remember. 

Assessing and Treating Clients With Dementia

The Alzheimer’s Association defines dementia as “a general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life” (Alzheimer’s Association, 2016). This term encompasses dozens of cognitive disorders of impaired memory formation, recall, and communication. The care and treatment of clients with dementia is dependent on multiple factors, including the stage of dementia, comorbidities, family support, and even the care setting. In your role, as the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, you must be prepared to not only treat clients with these various cognitive disorders, but also the multiple behavioral issues that often accompany them. For this Assignment, as you examine the client case study in this week’s Learning Resources, consider how you might assess and treat clients presenting with dementia.

The Assignment

Examine Case Study: An Elderly Iranian Man With Alzheimer’s Disease. You will be asked to make three decisions concerning the medication to prescribe to this client. Be sure to consider factors that might impact the client’s pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes.

• At each decision point stop to complete the following:
  • Decision #1
    • Which decision did you select?
    • Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #1 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
  • Decision #2
    • Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #2 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
  • Decision #3
    • Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
    • Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #3 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
• Also include how ethical considerations might impact your treatment plan and communication with clients.

Alzheimer’s Disease
76-year-old Iranian Male

BACKGROUND

Mr. Akkad is a 76 year old Iranian male who is brought to your office by his eldest son for “strange behavior.” Mr. Akkad was seen by his family physician who ruled out any organic basis for Mr. Akkad’s behavior. All laboratory and diagnostic imaging tests (including CT-scan of the head) were normal.

According to his son, he has been demonstrating some strange thoughts and behaviors for the past two years, but things seem to be getting worse. Per the client’s son, the family noticed that Mr. Akkad’s personality began to change a few years ago. He began to lose interest in religious activities with the family and became more “critical” of everyone. They also noticed that things he used to take seriously had become a source of “amusement” and “ridicule.”

Over the course of the past two years, the family has noticed that Mr. Akkad has been forgetting things. His son also reports that sometimes he has difficult “finding the right words” in a conversation and then will shift to an entirely different line of conversation.

SUBJECTIVE

During the clinical interview, Mr. Akkad is pleasant, cooperative and seems to enjoy speaking with you. You notice some confabulation during various aspects of memory testing, so the PMHNP performs a Mini-Mental State Exam. Mr. Akkad scores 18 out of 30 with primary deficits in orientation, registration, attention & calculation, and recall. The score suggests moderate dementia.

MENTAL STATUS EXAM

Mr. Akkad is 76 year old Iranian male who is cooperative with today’s clinical interview. His eye contact is poor. Speech is clear, coherent, but tangential at times. He makes no unusual motor movements and demonstrates no tic. Self-reported mood is euthymic. Affect however is restricted. He denies visual or auditory hallucinations. No delusional or paranoid thought processes noted. He is alert and oriented to person, partially oriented to place, but is disoriented to time and event [he reports that he thought he was coming to lunch but “wound up here”- referring to your office, at which point he begins to laugh]. Insight and judgment are impaired. Impulse control is also impaired as evidenced by Mr. Akkad’s standing up during the clinical interview and walking towards the door. When the PMHNP asked where he was going, he stated that he did not know. Mr. Akkad denies suicidal or homicidal ideation.

Diagnosis: Major neurocognitive disorder due to Alzheimer’s disease (presumptive)

RESOURCES

§ Folstein, M. F., Folstein, S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (2002). Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Decision Point One

Select what the PMHNP should do:

Begin Exelon (rivastigmine) 1.5 mg orally BID with an increase to 3 mg orally BID in 2 weeks

: Begin Aricept (donepezil) 5 mg orally at BEDTIME

Begin Razadyne (galantamine) 4 mg orally BID

RESEARCHED ISSUE ANALYSIS ESSAY

For this essay, you will write a well-researched analytical essay that examines, explains and analyzes an issue – with multiple, possibly conflicting perspectives – which you have chosen to write about. Opportunities for analyzing issues, problems or situations are found in every discipline, workplace and real-life situations. If you are an engineer, a business person, a scientist, a writer or just a voting citizen, you will be called upon to think about, closely examine and often to write documents that analyze in order to understand complicated issues in our professions or our lives. Every day there are complicated issues in current or past events, whether it is to understand the use of drones in modern warfare or the issue of prescription drug abuse on campus, which occupy our minds. Your essay will include background information that readers need to understand the issue as well as analysis of the opinions of various stakeholders* and subtopics of the larger issue. Your goal is to write a coherent, sophisticated analysis that will engage and inform your readers.

*Stakeholder: a group of people that is affected by an issue, whether they are potentially harmed by it, stand to gain from it, or their lives or those of people close to them are in some way touched by it

Synthesis/Thesis Statement:

Your thesis statement should be centered on an inclusive sentence or sentences that provide an overview for the reader and predict what your paper is about. If your issue is the use of prescription drug abuse, for example, your thesis should address the various stakeholders and perspectives in this issue and be clear, specific and focused. You will want to synthesize in your thesis all the moves you make as a writer who teases out the various components of this problem and analyzes how the various articles you research are arguing about how to solve the problem or why there is a problem. Your beginning thesis will be what we call a working thesis. That means that as you write your first draft of the paper, which may be a discovery draft, you will return to and change your thesis to include perhaps another perspective that you did not originally know about (perhaps you forgot to include the doctors who prescribe such drugs at first and just concentrated on the pharmaceutical companies, the young people, and sociologists). The thesis in your final paper will be that polished and finished statement or statements that are all inclusive and synthesize the various sub-issues or perspectives covered in the paper.

Analysis of Multiple Perspectives, Sub-Issues and/or Stakeholders (the body paragraphs):

In your research, you will need to find articles (both scholarly and mainstream press) that support any claim you make and build a framework in your essay that not only analyzes the views of various stakeholders or perspectives or sub-issues within the larger issue but also examines the justifications made by these groups. Notice how the various groups argue. Can you analyze the arguments rhetorically? Ideally, your analysis will be sophisticated, in that it does not just see two sides of an issue, but sees multiple parts of a larger situation, while carefully examining or analyzing each part.

Organization: Your essay should follow a clear organization plan that is logical and easy for the reader to keep up with; your thesis statement should give readers a sense of this plan. Sentences and paragraphs should be coherent and focused, and transitions should help the essay to flow clearly.

Research, Support or Evidence:

You will need to back up each claim you make within the analysis. You will use your sources to build credibility and gain authority to speak as a writer on a particular topic. Your aim is to persuade your audience of your

deeper understanding of this issue, thus you must use credible sources to back up everything you say. You can use your knowledge of ethical, emotional or logical appeals to analyze what various groups write about their role in the problem. You’ll want to avoid logical fallacies within your own writing. You will use both direct quotes and paraphrases and will cite all your sources correctly in the text as well as prepare a Works Cited page to accompany the essay.

Your six sources should be credible and 3-4 of the six should be scholarly ones. You can have several also from respected news sources like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. You should show that you are able to evaluate the ethos or credibility in the selection of your sources. Selected information should always be relevant to the central argument as well as quoted or paraphrased correctly to support each claim. They should also be well integrated into developed paragraphs and not just be dropped in but contextualized. This means each quote or paraphrase should back up or provide some support for your ideas, your analysis. You could also be analyzing how these various groups are making their arguments regarding their own role in the issue or problem.

Formatting Requirements of the Paper:

 Include an interesting and descriptive title that clearly announces the issue you are analyzing.

 Must be 1500 words (six pages) in the essay itself.

 Use Times MLA formatting standards

 Include Works Cited page written in MLA style including 3-4 scholarly and 2-3 mainstream sources (for a total of six sources).

 Submit final essays electronically

Grading or Assessment:

Your essay will be graded on the following:

Analysis

 Synthesis/Thesis

 Organization

 Research (use of sources, integrating sources, etc.)

 Conventions (style, grammar, etc.)

Due Dates

• Rough Draft: 11/24

I NEED TO USE THE ATTACHED ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY TO WRITE THE ISSUE ANALYSIS!

These are two SEPERATE PAPERS.

REQUIREING TWO SEPERATE REFERENCE PAGES

#1 Operating or Not Operating a Motor Vehicle?

Locate the case Village of Cross Plains v. Haanstad, 709 N.W.2d 447 (Wis. 2006) on the Internet. Review the Court’s analysis before addressing the hypothetical below.

Sleeping while intoxicated behind the wheel of a car, with the motor running, is usually enough for a conviction under a DUI statute. Can a defendant be convicted of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, where she only slid into the driver’s seat, but did not touch any of the vehicle’s controls? Provide a legal analysis of your decision.

Instructions

Your paper should be a minimum of 3 full pages in length;

W5 Assignment #2 Drug Trafficking and Enhanced Penalties

As you saw in the text, simple possession of a firearm during commission of a drug trafficking crime results in enhanced penalties of 5 years in prison under the applicable federal statute. The enhanced penalty is 10 years if the firearm is discharged during commission of the crime.

What happens if the defendant carries a firearm while attempting to regain possession of illegal drugs stolen from him, and the intended victim gains possession of the firearm and fires it?

See United States v. Echeverry, 649 F.3d 159 (2^nd Cir. 2011).

Your paper should be a minimum of 2 full pages in length;