| Course | NUR 302 Clinical Judgment and Holistic Assessment in Nursing |
|---|---|
| Module | Module 4 |
| Paper type | Narrated presentation, slide text with speaker notes |
| Length | 11 slides with speaker notes, about 1,050 words |
| Format | Slide deck with speaker notes, APA 7 citations |
| School | Southern New Hampshire University |
| Program | RN to BSN |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for NUR 302 Module 4
When the Power Is Part of the Prescription: Energy Insecurity as a Social Determinant of Health
[Student Name]
Southern New Hampshire University
NUR 302: Clinical Judgment and Holistic Assessment in Nursing
Project One Presentation
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.
Slide 1: Why This Determinant
Energy insecurity: not being able to meet basic household energy needs (Hernández, 2016).
Heat, cooling, refrigeration and powered medical equipment all depend on it.
It rarely appears on an admission assessment.
Speaker notes: Social determinants are usually discussed as food, housing and transportation. I chose energy because it sits underneath all three and because it is almost never asked about. Hernández defines energy insecurity as the inability to meet basic household energy needs. For our patients, that includes the heat in January, the air conditioning in a heat wave, the refrigerator that keeps insulin cold and the concentrator that delivers oxygen at night.
Slide 2: How Common It Is
2020 federal survey: 34 million U.S. households, 27%, had difficulty meeting energy needs (U.S. Energy Information Administration [EIA], 2022).
10% received a disconnection notice.
About 1.4 million households reported someone needed medical attention because the home was kept at an unsafe temperature.
Speaker notes: These figures come from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. More than a quarter of households reported difficulty with energy needs in 2020, and one in ten received a notice that their service would be shut off. The last number is the one I want nurses to hold onto: roughly 1.4 million households said someone needed medical care because the home was too hot or too cold. That is a health outcome, not only an economic one.
Slide 3: Three Dimensions
Economic: bills that take too large a share of income.
Physical: drafty, poorly insulated housing and old appliances.
Behavioral: coping strategies, such as space heaters, ovens left open or skipped meals (Hernández, 2016).
Speaker notes: Hernández interviewed 72 low-income families and described three dimensions that interact. The economic one is the bill. The physical one is the building, because an old, leaky apartment costs more to heat and still stays cold. The behavioral one is what families do to cope, and several of those coping strategies carry their own risks, from fire and carbon monoxide to choosing between the electric bill and groceries.
Slide 4: How It Reaches the Body
Cold homes: respiratory and cardiovascular strain.
Heat without cooling: dehydration, heat illness, worsening chronic disease.
Stress of unpaid bills: sleep and mental health.
Loss of power: failed medical devices and spoiled medications (Jessel et al., 2019).
Speaker notes: A review by Jessel and colleagues drew on 162 publications and described pathways from energy insecurity to health, noting that affected households often face it bundled with other hardships. They also separate acute episodes, such as a shutoff, from chronic ones, such as a family that keeps the thermostat low all winter. For nurses, the device pathway is the most urgent, because a patient on home oxygen or a feeding pump can deteriorate within hours of a shutoff.
Slide 5: What It Looks Like in Home Health
Composite patient: Mrs. A., 76, COPD, oxygen concentrator at night, lives alone.
Keeps the thermostat at 60 degrees to save money.
Received a shutoff notice in February; did not tell her nurse.
Speaker notes: Mrs. A. is a composite patient, but every detail comes from situations home health nurses describe. She had two COPD exacerbations in one winter. Her nurse assessed her lungs, her inhaler technique and her oxygen use, and all of it looked fine. What nobody asked about was the thermostat set at 60 degrees or the shutoff notice on the kitchen table. When the nurse finally saw the notice, the pattern of winter exacerbations made sense.
Slide 6: How to Ask
"In the past year, has the utility company threatened to shut off your service?"
"Have you kept your home colder or hotter than you wanted to save money?"
Ask about medical devices that need power and whether the utility knows about them.
Speaker notes: Asking does not require a new form. Two direct questions can be added to a home visit or an admission assessment, and they are best asked in a matter-of-fact way, the same tone we use for questions about falls. The third question matters because many utilities offer protections or priority restoration for customers who depend on medical equipment, but only if the household is registered and the paperwork is in place.
Slide 7: What Nurses Can Do
Refer to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program for bill and crisis help (Administration for Children and Families, n.d.).
Help complete medical certification paperwork that many utilities accept to delay a shutoff.
Plan for outages: backup oxygen, a cooling or warming center, and a check-in call.
Speaker notes: The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, funded federally and run by the states, helps with heating and cooling bills and with crisis situations such as a shutoff notice. Many utilities and state regulators also recognize a medical certificate that delays disconnection for a household with a serious medical need, although the rules vary by state and utility. Nurses can start that paperwork, coordinate with the provider and social worker, and build an outage plan into the care plan for patients who rely on powered devices.
Slide 8: For Our Agency
Add the two screening questions to the start-of-care assessment.
Keep a one-page local resource sheet in every nurse's bag.
Track how many patients screen positive and how many referrals are completed.
Speaker notes: Here is what I am proposing for our team. Two questions at start of care, one sheet listing the local energy assistance office, the utility's medical certification process and the nearest cooling and warming centers, and a simple count of positive screens and completed referrals over the next three months. That count will tell us whether this is common in our caseload and whether the referrals are actually reaching people.
Slide 9: Key Takeaways
Energy insecurity is common and largely invisible in clinical assessment.
It reaches health through temperature, stress and powered devices.
Two questions and a referral pathway can change what a nurse sees.
Speaker notes: If you remember one thing, let it be the thermostat. Mrs. A.'s lungs were being assessed carefully, but the cause of her winter exacerbations was in the next room. Asking about energy takes less than a minute, and it can open the door to help that already exists. Thank you, and I welcome questions.
References
Administration for Children and Families. (n.d.). Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ocs/programs/liheap
Hernández, D. (2016). Understanding "energy insecurity" and why it matters to health. Social Science & Medicine, 167, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.08.029
Jessel, S., Sawyer, S., & Hernández, D. (2019). Energy, poverty, and health in climate change: A comprehensive review of an emerging literature. Frontiers in Public Health, 7, Article 357. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00357
U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2022, April 11). In 2020, 27% of U.S. households had difficulty meeting their energy needs. Today in Energy. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51979
What the NUR 302 Module 4 instructions ask for
Project One in NUR 302 is typically a narrated presentation, due around Module 4, that examines one social determinant of health and its effect on a population or patient group. The instructions usually ask you to define the determinant, show how widespread it is with current data, explain how it affects health outcomes, describe how nurses can assess for it and propose interventions or resources. Many sections supply a slide template and expect speaker notes or recorded narration for every slide, with APA citations on the slides and a reference slide at the end. Deck length is often eight to twelve content slides. Your section's template and rubric decide the exact order, so match them before you build.
How this NUR 302 Module 4 project one presentation example is built
This deck moves in the order a nursing audience would need: what energy insecurity is, how common it is, what shapes it, how it reaches the body, what it looks like in one patient, how to ask about it and what to do. Each slide carries three or four short lines, and the speaker notes do the explaining, so the audience reads little and hears the argument. Statistics come from a federal survey and are reported exactly, with the year. Two peer-reviewed sources supply the definition, the three dimensions and the pathways to health. A composite home health patient on nighttime oxygen links the data to practice, and the final slides give the audience specific actions for their own agency.
Where the NUR 302 Module 4 rubric puts the points
The Project One rubric for this course generally scores the explanation of the determinant, the use of evidence and data, the analysis of its impact on health, the nursing interventions, the quality of the narration or speaker notes, and APA citations. The impact and intervention criteria carry the most weight, and graders look for interventions that follow logically from the analysis rather than a generic list. Slides crowded with text lose points on presentation quality, while slides with no notes lose points on communication. Citations must appear where the evidence is used, on the slide or in the notes, and match a reference slide formatted in APA 7.
NUR 302 Module 4 help: the mistakes that cost points
A frequent mistake in Project One is choosing a determinant so broad, such as poverty, that the deck never gets specific enough to suggest a nursing action. Another is filling slides with full paragraphs, which makes the narration redundant and hurts the presentation score. Students also lose points by citing statistics without a year or source, or by using figures from advocacy websites when federal data exist. Some decks describe the problem well and then end with a single slide of vague recommendations. Budget at least two slides for assessment and intervention, and make sure each recommendation names who does it and what resource it uses.
Get NUR 302 Module 4 written to your instructions
Upload the Project One template, the rubric and the determinant you picked or were assigned. You receive a slide deck with speaker notes written to that template within 24 to 48 hours, and a first sample from the desk is free. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Southern New Hampshire University document.
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NUR 302 Module 4 questions, answered
Where can I find a free NUR 302 Module 4 Project One presentation sample?
This page shows one in full: nine slides on energy insecurity as a social determinant of health, with speaker notes, APA citations and a reference slide. If your section assigns a different determinant or template, a custom deck can be requested.
How many slides should NUR 302 Project One have?
Follow the template and rubric first. Many sections land around eight to twelve content slides plus a title and reference slide. Keep each slide short and let the speaker notes or narration carry the explanation.
Which social determinant is best for the NUR 302 presentation?
Pick one narrow enough to lead to specific nursing actions and one with good data. Food insecurity, transportation, housing quality, health literacy and energy insecurity all work. A narrow topic also makes it easier to find current federal statistics.
Do citations go on the slides or in the notes?
Either is acceptable in most sections, as long as each fact is cited where it appears and every citation matches the reference slide. Many students put a short citation on the slide and fuller detail in the notes.
Do I have to record narration for Project One?
Some sections require a recorded voiceover and others accept written speaker notes. Check the instructions. If you record, write the notes first anyway, because they keep the narration on time and aligned with the rubric.