MSN5400 Policy Literature Review: How to Write a Full-Marks Paper
A practical breakdown of every rubric section — selecting the right healthcare legislature, finding and synthesising peer-reviewed articles, presenting statistical data with population impact, analysing the nursing advocacy role, and formatting everything correctly in APA 7th edition.
The MSN5400 Policy Literature Review is not a summary paper. Students who treat it like one — picking a law, describing what it does, listing a few articles — consistently leave 20 to 30 points on the table. The rubric is explicit about what earns full marks at each section: the legislature must be recent and clearly explained, the literature review must make strong connections to the issue and the legislation, the statistical data must link population demographics to health outcomes, and the nursing role section must provide actual examples of nurse leadership and involvement. That is a different task from description. This guide walks through every section of that rubric and shows you exactly what the difference looks like in practice.
What This Guide Covers
The Rubric — Understanding What Each Section Is Really Worth
Before you write a single word, read the rubric carefully. It is 100 points distributed across six categories, and the weighting tells you exactly where to spend your energy. The literature review, statistical data, and nursing role sections are each worth 20 points. Combined, that is 60% of your grade. The legislature selection is 10 points. Organisation and APA formatting split the remaining 30. Most students do the opposite — they spend most of their time on the description of the law and rush the sections that are worth the most.
The rubric’s “Excellent” descriptors are your writing targets — not aspirational ideals, but specific functional requirements. “Strong connections to the issue and legislation” is not a vague quality standard. It means each article you review must be explicitly linked to how it informs our understanding of the law’s impact. If you review an article and never connect it to the legislature you selected, the grader has no way to award the full literature review points.
Selecting the Right Healthcare Legislature — What Qualifies and What Doesn’t
The assignment requires a legislature passed within the last five years. That is a hard constraint. An older law — even a landmark one — does not qualify regardless of how relevant it is to healthcare. The other requirement is that the law is relevant to healthcare delivery, access, or practice. That is a wide net, and students often pick laws that are too narrow (a single state-level formulary change with no peer-reviewed literature base) or too broad (a general spending bill where it is impossible to identify specific health outcome data).
The “Last 5 Years” Calculation
Five years from the current academic year means legislation signed into law from 2020 onward. This includes the No Surprises Act (December 2020), the American Rescue Plan Act’s healthcare provisions (March 2021), the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug pricing provisions (August 2022), the Consolidated Appropriations Act’s mental health parity provisions (2023), and state-level laws expanding scope of practice for nurse practitioners passed between 2020 and 2024. Any law enacted before January 2020 does not meet the recency requirement. If you are uncertain whether a specific bill qualifies, check the date it was signed into law — not introduced, not debated, not passed by one chamber, but signed.
Beyond the date, the most important practical factor in choosing your legislature is the availability of peer-reviewed literature. A law that was signed in 2023 may have very limited peer-reviewed research yet — academic publishing takes time. You need at least three peer-reviewed articles published within the last five years that are directly relevant to the issue the law addresses. If you cannot find them before you commit to a legislature, choose a different one. Changing your topic after you have started writing costs far more time than selecting correctly upfront.
Before finalising your legislature choice, go to PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) and search the name of the law or the issue it addresses with a date filter of 2020 to present. If you find fewer than five relevant peer-reviewed results, the topic may be too new or too narrow. You want at least five to eight results so you can choose the three most directly relevant and have backup sources for your statistical data section.
Also check CINAHL (through your university library), which indexes nursing-specific journals that PubMed sometimes misses. The combination of PubMed and CINAHL covers the vast majority of peer-reviewed healthcare and nursing literature you will need for this assignment.
Healthcare Legislatures That Work Well for This Assignment
The following options all meet the recency requirement, have substantial peer-reviewed literature, contain clear health outcome data, and have documented nursing involvement in their passage or implementation. These are not the only valid choices — they are starting points that have shown strong literature bases.
No Surprises Act (2020)
- Signed December 2020; protects patients from unexpected out-of-network bills
- Strong literature base — multiple JAMA, NEJM, and health policy journals
- Clear statistical data: affects ~20% of ED encounters; documented cost reductions
- APN advocacy well documented through ANA and AANP positions on the bill
- Best angle: financial toxicity, patient trust, healthcare access equity
Inflation Reduction Act — Drug Pricing Provisions (2022)
- Allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time; caps insulin at $35/month
- Peer-reviewed literature growing rapidly — strong health economics publications
- Clear population impact: Medicare beneficiaries, diabetics, older adults
- Nursing home and ambulatory care nurses directly affected by implementation
- Best angle: chronic disease management, medication adherence, health equity
Mental Health Parity Strengthening (2023–2024)
- Consolidated Appropriations Act and subsequent HHS rules strengthened mental health parity requirements
- Addresses longstanding disparity between mental/substance use disorder coverage and medical coverage
- Strong literature on parity gaps, treatment access, and suicidality outcomes
- Psychiatric-mental health APNs deeply involved in advocacy and implementation
- Best angle: health equity, rural mental health access, PMHNP scope of practice
State Nurse Practitioner Full Practice Authority Laws (2020–2024)
- Multiple states enacted full practice authority for NPs between 2020 and 2024 (including pandemic-era temporary orders made permanent)
- Directly relevant to MSN students — this is your scope of practice
- Literature on outcomes: patient access in rural areas, quality of NP-led care, cost-effectiveness
- AANP, ANA, and state nursing associations were primary advocates
- Best angle: healthcare access, primary care shortage, nursing’s evolving role
Conducting the Literature Review — Finding Articles That Earn Full Points
The rubric requires a minimum of three peer-reviewed articles, and it rewards “comprehensive review with strong connections to the issue and legislation.” That phrase — strong connections — is doing a lot of work. It is not asking you to find three articles that mention your legislature. It is asking for articles that together build an evidence-based picture of the problem the legislature was designed to address, the extent of that problem, and the effects of the legislation once implemented.
Article Type 1: The Problem Article
An article that documents the scope and impact of the problem the legislature addresses — before the law was passed. For the No Surprises Act, this would be an article documenting the prevalence, cost, and population distribution of surprise billing. This establishes why the law was necessary.
Article Type 2: The Implementation Article
An article that examines how the legislature has been or is being implemented — challenges, stakeholder responses, early data on compliance. This shows you understand that laws do not fix problems automatically; implementation quality determines outcomes.
Article Type 3: The Outcomes Article
An article that examines the measurable health or financial outcomes linked to the issue or the early impact of the legislation. Ideally, this article includes population-specific data — which groups benefited, which remain underserved, what the data show about health equity.
You are not required to use exactly this structure, but articles that fill these three roles naturally produce strong connections to the legislation without requiring you to force the link. If your three articles all focus on the same narrow aspect of the problem, you will struggle to demonstrate the comprehensive understanding the rubric is rewarding.
Where to Search for Peer-Reviewed Articles
Best for Medical and Health Policy Literature
Free access at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Use MeSH terms for precision. Filter by publication date (2020–present) and article type (Clinical Trial, Review, Systematic Review). Most results link to abstracts; full text may require university library access.
Best for Nursing-Specific Literature
Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature — indexes journals specifically relevant to nursing practice and policy. Access through your university library. Search for your legislature by name and filter by peer-reviewed, full text, 2020–present.
Good for Identifying Articles to Then Access Properly
Useful for finding relevant articles, but always access the full text through your university library rather than citing from Google Scholar directly. Confirm the article is peer-reviewed by checking the journal’s editorial policy before including it.
High-Quality Journals for Healthcare Policy
Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs publish policy-focused articles with strong editorial standards. Articles here are universally accepted as peer-reviewed and carry strong credibility with graders.
Nursing-Specific Policy Research
The International Journal of Nursing Studies, Journal of Nursing Scholarship, and Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice specifically focus on nursing’s role in healthcare policy — directly relevant to the nursing advocacy section of this paper.
Academic Source Complete / ProQuest
Your university library likely provides access to Academic Source Complete and ProQuest Health & Medical Complete. These aggregate multiple databases and allow you to filter by peer-reviewed status — the most efficient way to search across sources simultaneously.
Government websites, agency reports (CMS, HHS, CDC), professional association position statements, newspaper articles, and magazine features do not qualify as peer-reviewed articles. They can be used as supporting sources for statistical data, but they cannot count toward your three-article requirement. The defining feature of a peer-reviewed article is that it was evaluated by independent expert reviewers before publication in an academic journal. If you are uncertain, look at the journal’s website — peer-reviewed journals explicitly state their editorial review process.
One common mistake: citing the Federal Register or a CMS final rule as a peer-reviewed source. These are primary legal and regulatory documents — valuable references, but not peer-reviewed articles. Your article requirement is specifically for academic research.
How to Synthesise Articles — The Move That Earns the Full 20 Points
Students who earn 15–19 points on the literature review section are usually students who summarise each article separately and move on. Students who earn the full 20 are the ones who connect the articles to each other and to the legislation. Synthesis is the difference. It is the analytical move of showing the reader what three separate articles, taken together, tell us about the issue that no single article tells us alone.
Notice what the synthesis version does that the summary version does not: it tells a story across the three articles, with each one adding a layer to a single analytical conclusion. That is the “strong connections to the issue and legislation” the rubric rewards. If your literature review section reads like three separate Wikipedia entries, restructure it around the question: what do these articles together tell us about this law’s necessity, implementation, and impact?
Statistical Data and Health Outcomes — Turning Numbers Into Analysis
This section is worth 20 points, and the rubric’s “Excellent” descriptor is specific: thorough statistical data that clearly links population impacts and health outcomes to the issue. The keyword is “links.” Raw numbers without population context and outcome analysis earn the Fair band at best. The section needs to answer three questions: How big is the problem? Who does it affect disproportionately? What do the data show about outcomes after the legislature?
Statistical Data That Earns Fair Marks
“Surprise billing affects many Americans each year. Studies show that out-of-network charges can cost patients hundreds or thousands of dollars. After the No Surprises Act was implemented, fewer patients reported receiving unexpected bills. The act has been beneficial for patients across the country.”
Numbers are missing. Population groups are unnamed. “Many Americans” and “fewer patients” are not statistical data — they are vague impressions. This earns 10–14 points at best.
Statistical Data That Earns Full Marks
“Surprise billing affected approximately 1 in 5 emergency department visits and 1 in 6 in-network hospitalizations prior to the NSA, with average out-of-pocket costs ranging from $750 to $2,600 per incident (CMS, 2022). Low-income patients and those in rural areas faced disproportionate exposure due to limited in-network provider availability. Within the first year of implementation, self-reported surprise bills declined by 27%, and low-income families demonstrated a 15% improvement in care-seeking behaviour, suggesting reduced financial deterrence (Hoadley et al., 2023). However, racial and ethnic minority patients — who use emergency services at higher rates — continue to report residual billing confusion, indicating that implementation gaps remain.”
Specific numbers, specific populations, pre/post comparison, disparity data, outcome connection. Every element cited.
Statistics from government agencies and research institutions must be cited just like academic articles. For a CMS report: (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services [CMS], 2022). For a Kaiser Family Foundation report: (Kaiser Family Foundation [KFF], 2023). For statistics drawn from a peer-reviewed article: (Hoadley et al., 2022). Do not present statistics without a citation — unattributed numbers in a graduate paper raise immediate questions about accuracy and academic integrity. If you found a statistic in a news article that traced it to an original source, go to the original source and cite that directly.
The Nursing Role Section — What “Insightful Analysis With Examples” Means
This section is worth 20 points and is the one most students underwrite. The rubric says “Excellent” requires “insightful analysis of nursing role in policy advocacy, supported by examples of nurse leadership and involvement.” The operative word is examples. General statements about nurses being important advocates for patients and communities do not earn full marks here, no matter how well written they are. You need to name specific organisations, specific actions, specific APNs or nursing leaders, and show concretely what they did to influence the legislature.
Identify Specific Nursing Organisations That Advocated
For any major federal healthcare legislation, the American Nurses Association (ANA), the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), or specialty nursing organisations were likely involved. Find their official position statements, testimony records, or press releases related to the specific legislature you chose. These are primary source evidence of nursing advocacy that you can cite and describe specifically in your paper.
Describe the Specific Advocacy Actions Taken
Advocacy takes specific forms: formal testimony before congressional committees, submission of public comment letters during the regulatory rulemaking process, lobbying visits to congressional offices, participation in coalition partnerships with other healthcare stakeholders, public awareness campaigns directed at patients, and policy briefs submitted to federal agencies. Your paper should describe which of these forms of advocacy occurred — not just state that “nurses advocated for the legislation.”
Connect the APN Clinical Role to the Policy Context
Advanced practice nurses bring something to policy advocacy that other stakeholders do not: direct patient care experience that makes abstract policy problems concrete and human. Explain how APNs’ clinical experiences — seeing patients delay care due to fear of surprise bills, managing patients who rationed insulin before drug pricing reform, treating mental health crises that could have been prevented by better parity coverage — contributed evidence and moral authority to the advocacy effort. This is the “insightful analysis” part that distinguishes the 20-point response from the 15-point one.
Address the Implementation Role, Not Just the Advocacy Role
Nurses don’t stop being involved once a law is passed. APNs, nursing managers, and nursing leadership are frequently on the front lines of implementing new healthcare legislation — updating billing practices, educating patients about their new rights, developing institutional policies to comply with new requirements, and monitoring whether the law’s intended protections are actually reaching patients. Including this dimension shows you understand that nursing’s policy role extends beyond the legislative moment into the operational reality of patient care.
Finding Evidence of Nursing Advocacy for Your Specific Legislature
Search the ANA website (nursingworld.org), AANP website (aanp.org), and relevant specialty organisation sites for position statements, testimony, and press releases related to your chosen legislature. For the No Surprises Act specifically, the ANA issued formal support statements and collaborated with a coalition of patient advocacy and healthcare professional organisations during the bill’s development. For drug pricing legislation, AARP’s nursing council and the ANA both submitted formal comments during the Inflation Reduction Act’s regulatory development. These documented actions are what the rubric means by “examples of nurse leadership and involvement.”
Also search Congressional records at congress.gov for testimony related to hearings on the legislation. Expert nurses have testified before Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearings on several of the legislatures listed above. Citing specific testimony is among the strongest forms of evidence for nursing involvement in policy.
Paper Structure and the 5-Page Limit — How to Manage Your Space
Five pages excluding the title page and references is tighter than it sounds for a paper with four substantive sections. Students who do not plan their page distribution before writing almost always discover that their legislature overview has consumed two pages and they have three pages left for the three highest-weighted sections. Here is how to think about the space.
The legislature overview is not worth 10 points because it is the most important section — it is 10 points because it is a necessary framing device. Keep it concise. Explain what the law does, why it was needed, and what its key provisions are. Two or three tight paragraphs is sufficient. If you find yourself at the bottom of page one still explaining the legislature, you are overwriting the lowest-weighted section at the expense of the highest-weighted ones.
Introduce the health policy issue briefly, name the legislation, explain its core mechanism and scope, and state the paper’s purpose. This paragraph does not need to be long — it needs to be precise. The grader needs enough context to understand what follows, not a full legislative history.
Review each of your three articles in a way that builds toward a synthesised conclusion. Cover the article’s focus, key findings, and relevance to the legislation. Then close the section with a paragraph that synthesises across all three — what they collectively reveal about the problem, the law’s design, or its effects. This closing synthesis paragraph is what earns full marks.
Present population-level data on the scope of the problem, then demographic breakdown of affected groups, then outcome data before and after the legislation where available. Every number needs a citation. Close with a sentence or two connecting the data back to the legislation — what the numbers tell us about whether the law is achieving its stated aims.
This section has three natural sub-components: APNs’ advocacy for the bill (pre-passage), nursing organisations’ formal involvement, and nurses’ role in implementation (post-passage). You do not need sub-headings for these — a well-organised set of paragraphs works. What you do need is at least one specific named action per component.
Summarise the key findings across all four sections in two or three sentences. Add one forward-looking sentence about what nursing leadership needs to continue doing to ensure the legislation achieves its patient-protection goals. Do not introduce new information in the conclusion.
APA 7th Edition Formatting — The Details That Cost 15 Points
APA formatting is worth 15 points — and students lose these points not because they do not know APA, but because they do not apply it consistently under time pressure. The most common errors in nursing policy papers are specific and fixable.
In-Text Citation Errors
Using “et al.” for a two-author source (APA 7 requires both names for two authors). Writing “Smith, 2022” without parentheses in a narrative citation. Omitting the year in a parenthetical citation. Citing a source in the text that does not appear in the reference list. Using “ibid” (not used in APA). Placing the period before the closing parenthesis of a citation.
Correct In-Text Citations
Two authors: (Smith & Jones, 2022) always — never “et al.” Three or more authors: (Smith et al., 2022) from the first citation. Narrative: “Smith and Jones (2022) found that…” Direct quote (rare in policy papers): (Smith & Jones, 2022, p. 45). Every source in text has a matching reference list entry.
Reference List Errors
Alphabetising by first name instead of last name. Forgetting to italicise journal name and volume number. Using “Vol.” and “No.” — APA 7 uses just the number in the volume slot, not “Vol.” Failing to include a DOI when one is available. Capitalising every word of the article title (only capitalise first word, first word after a colon, and proper nouns). Putting the city and state before the publisher name (outdated — APA 7 drops location for publishers).
Correct Reference List Format
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article with only first word capitalised. Journal Name in Title Case and Italics, volume number(issue number), page–page. https://doi.org/xxxxx — note the DOI formatted as a hyperlink URL, not just the number. Hanging indent for all entries. Double-spaced, no extra space between entries.
Title Page and Header Errors
Including “Running head:” in the header (removed in APA 7 — just the header text). Omitting the course name, instructor name, or institution. Using a different font from the body. Forgetting the page number on the title page. Centring the abstract header but not bolding it (it should be bold and centred in APA 7).
Correct Title Page Format
Paper title (bold, title case, centered, 3–4 lines below the top margin). Author name(s). Institution name. Course number and name. Instructor name. Assignment due date. Page number top right — no “Running head:” label. Body of paper: Times New Roman or similar serif 12pt, double-spaced, 1-inch margins. Level-1 headings: bold, centered, title case.
The APA maintains a free style guide and reference examples at apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples. Every reference type — journal article, government report, book chapter, website — has a formatted example you can follow exactly. This is more reliable than citation generators, which frequently make errors in APA 7 formatting. For this assignment, the reference types you will most likely use are: journal article with DOI, journal article without DOI, government or organisation report, and website.
Errors That Cost Points — and How to Avoid Them Before Submission
These are the patterns that appear most consistently in papers that score in the 70–80 range when they could have scored in the 90–100 range. None of them require rewriting the paper — they require applying the rubric criteria more precisely.
Describing the Law Instead of Explaining It
Listing what a law does (balance billing prohibited, arbitration established, price transparency required) is description. Explaining the law means showing why each provision addresses a specific problem — how each mechanism translates from legislative text to patient experience. The rubric rewards explanation.
Summarising Articles Without Connecting Them
Three separate article summaries is not a literature review — it is an annotated bibliography. The review structure should show the cumulative picture the literature builds when read together. What do these articles collectively say about the problem, the law’s design, and its effects?
Statistics Without Population Context
Citing that 20% of ED visits involve surprise billing is a fact. Explaining that this disproportionately affects patients in rural areas who have no in-network alternatives — and then linking that to what happened to rural patients after the act — is the statistical analysis the rubric is awarding 20 points for.
Generic Nursing Advocacy Statements
“Nurses have always been patient advocates” is true and earns zero points in this section. “The ANA submitted formal comments to the No Surprises Act proposed rulemaking in 2021 specifically requesting stronger protections for patients in states with limited in-network emergency providers” is a specific advocacy action that demonstrates nursing’s concrete involvement.
Exceeding 5 Pages
The 5-page limit is a hard constraint. Papers that run long do not earn extra points — they signal poor editing and planning. If your draft is 6.5 pages, the solution is not to shrink the margins or reduce the font size. It is to identify where you are overwriting (usually the legislature overview) and tighten those sections.
Sources Outside the 5-Year Window
Every reference must be published within the last 5 years. This includes your peer-reviewed articles and your statistical sources. A 2018 study may be methodologically excellent, but it does not qualify for this assignment. Check every source’s publication date before including it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Need Support With Your MSN Nursing Policy Paper?
From legislature selection and literature synthesis to statistical data analysis and APA formatting — our specialist nursing and healthcare writing team provides expert guidance for graduate-level policy papers at every stage of the process.
Nursing Assignment Help Get StartedWhat This Assignment Is Actually Preparing You For
The Policy Literature Review is not a bureaucratic exercise in following a rubric. It is a simulation of the kind of analytical work APNs are increasingly expected to do in clinical leadership, health system administration, and professional advocacy roles. The ability to read a piece of legislation, find the research that contextualises it, understand what the data say about its effects on specific populations, and articulate nursing’s role in shaping and implementing it — that is the skill set of a nurse who can sit at a policy table and contribute meaningfully.
Most nurses are comfortable advocating for individual patients. Far fewer are comfortable advocating for the structural changes that would protect thousands of patients they will never meet. The point of assignments like this one is to close that gap. When you work through which peer-reviewed articles best document the problem, you are learning how to read healthcare policy literature. When you find the statistical data on which populations were most harmed before the legislation and most helped after, you are learning how to make an evidence-based case. When you document what the ANA did to push a bill forward, you are learning that nursing organisations have done this before and can do it again.
That is worth doing carefully — not just for the grade, but because the nurses who do this work well are the ones who end up shaping the policies that the next generation of nurses will be implementing.
Continue building your graduate nursing writing skills: nursing assignment help · literature review writing · research paper writing · public health assignment help · nursing case study writing · proofreading and editing · critical analysis papers · data analysis help · writing effective introductions · academic writing services