As you establish your goals and objectives for this course, you are committing to an organized plan that will frame your practicum experience in a clinical setting, including planned activities, assessment, and achievement of defined outcomes. In particular, they must address the categories of clinical reasoning, quality in your clinical specialty, and interpersonal collaborative practice. 

For this Assignment, you will consider the areas you aim to focus on to gain practical experience as an advanced practice nurse. Then, you will develop a Practicum Experience Plan (PEP) containing the objectives you will fulfill in order to achieve your aims. In this practicum experience, when developing your goals and objectives, be sure to keep psychiatric assessment and diagnostic reasoning in mind. 

• Review your Clinical Skills Self-Assessment Form you submitted last week and think about areas for which you would like to gain application-level experience and/or continued growth as an advanced practice nurse. How can your experiences in the practicum help you achieve these aims?
• Review the information related to developing objectives provided in this week’s Learning Resources. Your practicum learning objectives that you want to achieve during your practicum experience must be:
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Results-focused
  • Time-bound
  • Reflective of the higher-order domains of Bloom’s taxonomy (i.e., application level and above)

Note: Please make sure your objectives are individualized and outlined in your Practicum Experience Plan (PEP). While you may add previous objectives to continue to work toward. You must have 3 new objectives for each class, each quarter. 

• Discuss your professional aims and your proposed practicum objectives with your Preceptor to ascertain if the necessary resources are available at your practicum site.
• Select one nursing theory and one counseling/psychotherapy theory to best guide your clinical practice. Explain why you selected these theories. Support your approach with evidence-based literature.
• Create a timeline of practicum activities that demonstrates how you plan to meet these goals and objectives based on your practicum requirements.

ASSIGNMENT: Record the required information in each area of the Practicum Experience Plan template, including three to four (3–4) practicum learning objectives you will use to facilitate your learning during the practicum experience. 

Assessment is as essential to family therapy as it is to individual therapy. Although families often present with one person identified as the “problem,” the assessment process will help you better understand family roles and determine whether the identified problem client is in fact the root of the family’s issues.

To prepare:

• Review this week’s Learning Resources and reflect on the insights they provide on family assessment. Be sure to review the resource on psychotherapy genograms.
• Download the Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Note Template and review the requirements of the documentation. There is also an exemplar provided with detailed guidance and examples.
• View the Mother and Daughter: A Cultural Tale video in the Learning Resources and consider how you might assess the family in the case study.

THE ASSIGNMENT

Document the following for the family in the video, using the Comprehensive Evaluation Note Template: 

• Chief complaint
• History of present illness
• Past psychiatric history
• Substance use history
• Family psychiatric/substance use history
• Psychosocial history/Developmental history
• Medical history
• Review of systems (ROS)
• Physical assessment (if applicable)
• Mental status exam
• Differential diagnosis—Include a minimum of three differential diagnoses and include how you derived each diagnosis in accordance with DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria
• Case formulation and treatment plan
• Include a psychotherapy genogram for the family

Note: For any item you are unable to address from the video, explain how you would gather this information and why it is important for diagnosis and treatment planning.