| Course | HCP 517 Communication and Reporting Mechanisms in Compliance (HCP/517) |
|---|---|
| Week | 3 |
| Paper type | Compliance training paper |
| Length | about 1,166 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | MHA |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for HCP 517 Week 3
From One Annual Video to Eleven Role-Based Sessions: Designing Compliance Training for Hospice Physicians, Nurses, Aides, Volunteers and Marketing Staff
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
HCP/517: Communication and Reporting Mechanisms in Compliance
Week 3 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The hospice, its roles, sessions and results are composites written for a model paper; federal findings and research come from the sources listed.
When the composite nonprofit hospice's compliance director asked how staff were trained on compliance, she learned that every employee, from chaplains and aides to billers and the medical director, watched the same 40-minute video each year and clicked through a ten-question quiz. Completion was 98%. No one could say whether it changed anything. This paper describes the training program that replaced it.
Starting From Roles and Risks
Effective training begins with what people do. The director listed each role, the tasks it performs and the compliance risks those tasks create, drawing on the hospice's risk assessment, its new policies and federal findings. A federal review of hospice surveys found that from 2012 through 2016 over 80% of hospices had at least one deficiency, the most common involving poor care planning, mismanagement of aide services and inadequate assessments of patients (Office of Inspector General, 2019). Those findings pointed directly at nursing content.
Core Training for Everyone
All employees and volunteers complete a 30-minute core session at hire and each year, covering the code of conduct, privacy, how to report concerns and protection from retaliation. Core content stays short so role-specific sessions can carry the detail.
Eleven Role-Based Sessions
The program includes eleven role-based sessions, each 45 to 90 minutes, delivered in small groups:
Physicians and nurse practitioners: writing prognosis narratives in their own words, face-to-face encounters and recertification.
Admissions nurses: documenting eligibility findings and explaining hospice to families.
Case manager nurses: care planning, recertification reviews and general inpatient criteria.
On-call nurses: level-of-care decisions at night.
Nurses supervising aides: aide care plans and supervisory visits.
Aides: following the aide care plan and reporting changes.
Social workers and chaplains: documentation of their visits and family communication about eligibility.
Volunteers: boundaries, privacy and reporting.
Intake and scheduling staff: election statements and patient choice.
Marketing and community relations staff: kickback rules and gifts.
Billing staff: levels of care, cap tracking and overpayment reporting.
What the Sessions Look Like
The physician session illustrates the approach. The medical director brings six anonymized eligibility narratives from the hospice's own records: two strong, two weak and two copied word for word from a prior benefit period. Physicians discuss what each tells a reviewer about the patient's decline, then rewrite a weak narrative using the patient's actual findings, such as weight loss, declining function scores, recurrent infections or increasing symptom burden. They leave with a one-page guide listing disease-specific indicators and phrases that add nothing, such as a statement that the patient remains appropriate for hospice with no findings behind it.
The Nursing Sessions
Nurses supervising aides review the aide care plan requirements and practice a supervisory visit using a checklist, addressing the federal finding that aide services are a common deficiency. Case manager nurses review care plans from the hospice's records against the conditions of participation and practice updating them after a change in the patient's condition, a skill surveyors frequently find lacking. On-call nurses work through five level-of-care scenarios drawn from real night calls, deciding in each whether the symptoms could be managed at home with added visits or medication changes.
Marketing and Intake
Marketing staff discuss offers they have actually received or been tempted to make, such as providing free staff to a nursing facility's activities program or sponsoring a facility's holiday party, and learn why each could be seen as an inducement for referrals. Intake staff practice explaining the election statement and the patient's right to choose any hospice, using role play with a colleague acting as a hurried discharge planner.
Leaders and the Board
Managers learn how to respond when staff raise concerns and how to reinforce training on the job. Board members receive a one-hour session each year on hospice compliance risks and their oversight role, including how to read the compliance dashboard.
Methods That Work
Research shapes how sessions are delivered. A Cochrane review of 215 studies found that educational meetings probably slightly improve health professionals' compliance with desired practice, with a median improvement of about 4 percentage points compared with no intervention (Forsetlund et al., 2021). Modest effects argue for making sessions as practical as possible: physicians rewrite anonymized narratives from the hospice's own records, nurses work through general inpatient cases and marketing staff discuss real offers they have received.
Pairing Training With Feedback
Education works better with feedback. A review of audit and feedback trials found larger improvements when feedback is repeated, comes from a supervisor or colleague and includes targets and an action plan (Ivers et al., 2012). Each physician therefore receives a quarterly review of five of their own narratives from the medical director, with specific suggestions, and nurses receive results from the monthly recertification audit. Training tells people what good looks like; feedback tells them how close they are.
Timing
Training is scheduled when it matters: at hire before independent work, before new rules take effect each October with the annual hospice payment rule and within 30 days when an audit reveals a gap. After the first eligibility audit found narratives copied from prior periods, all physicians attended a focused session within three weeks.
Reaching Field Staff
Hospice staff work in homes and facilities across six counties. Sessions are offered in person at team meetings and live by video, recorded for those who miss them, with short refreshers on the mobile documentation device.
Cost and Time
The program uses about 2,400 staff hours a year, roughly three times the old video, mostly in role-based sessions. The director justified the cost to the finance committee by pointing to what weak documentation costs: a single denied long-stay patient can mean months of repayment, and survey deficiencies can lead to enforcement. Sessions are built into existing team meetings where possible to limit time away from patients.
Keeping Content Current
Each session has an owner who updates it every year and after any rule change or audit finding. The compliance director reviews all content annually against the risk assessment, retiring material that no longer matches the hospice's risks.
Measuring Effectiveness
Completion is tracked but not treated as success. The program measures narrative quality scores from monthly audits, the share of general inpatient days with daily documentation of need, supervisory visit timeliness, survey deficiencies, hotline questions from marketing staff and staff confidence in knowing how to report concerns.
Early Results
Six months after launch, the share of physician narratives rated adequate rose from 54% to 81%, general inpatient days with daily need documentation rose from 71% to 93% and the hospice's next survey found no aide supervision deficiencies.
Conclusion
One video for everyone produced high completion and no evidence of change. Role-based sessions built from the hospice's risks and federal survey findings, delivered with practical cases and paired with feedback from audits, target the tasks that create risk. Research on educational meetings and feedback explains the design, and measures of documentation quality and audit results show whether training works.
References
Forsetlund, L., O'Brien, M. A., Forsén, L., Mwai, L., Reinar, L. M., Okwen, M. P., Horsley, T., & Rose, C. J. (2021). Continuing education meetings and workshops: Effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (9), CD003030. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD003030.pub3
Ivers, N., Jamtvedt, G., Flottorp, S., Young, J. M., Odgaard-Jensen, J., French, S. D., O'Brien, M. A., Johansen, M., Grimshaw, J., & Oxman, A. D. (2012). Audit and feedback: Effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (6), CD000259. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000259.pub3
Office of Inspector General. (2019). Hospice deficiencies pose risks to Medicare beneficiaries (OEI-02-17-00020). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-02-17-00020.pdf
What the HCP 517 Week 3 instructions ask
HCP 517 Week 3 usually asks students to design compliance training and education for their chosen sector's compliance program. Prompts may ask students to identify audiences, determine content for each role, choose delivery methods and frequency, explain how training connects to policies and risks and describe how effectiveness will be measured. Some versions ask for a training calendar or curriculum table. Strong papers base content on the sector's documented risks and each role's actual tasks, use interactive, case-based methods rather than generic slides, tie training to policies and audit findings, use research on what makes education change practice and measure results through behavior and audits, not attendance alone.
How this HCP 517 Week 3 example is built
The paper opens with the compliance director learning that every employee, from chaplains to billers, watched the same 40-minute video each year. Eleven audiences are identified, each with its own risks. Content for each comes from the hospice's risks and federal survey findings that care planning, aide services and assessments are the most common deficiencies. Physicians practice writing prognosis narratives from real cases; nurses learn eligibility documentation and general inpatient criteria; aides and volunteers learn reporting; marketing staff learn kickback rules. Research showing educational meetings produce modest gains, and that feedback helps, shapes a design pairing sessions with audit results. Measures of documentation quality and early results close the paper.
HCP 517 Week 3 grading rubric: where the points go
In the training week, the central question for graders is whether this plan would actually change how people in the chosen sector do their jobs. Graders look for defined audiences, role-specific content tied to risks and policies, appropriate methods and timing, a link between training and audits or monitoring and measures that go beyond completion rates. Using research on the effectiveness of education earns credit with most graders. A table or list of sessions makes the plan easy to follow. Writing quality and APA format account for the remaining points. Plans built on one generic annual course, or measured only by attendance, generally score lower than plans tied to each role's risks.
HCP 517 Week 3 help: mistakes to avoid
The most frequent weakness in HCP 517 Week 3 is designing one course for everyone. List the roles in your sector and ask what each person does that could create a compliance problem. Build content from those tasks, your policies and documented risks. Use cases from your own setting and interactive formats such as rewriting real documentation. Time training when it matters: at hire, before new rules take effect and after audits reveal gaps. Pair education with feedback from audits, since research shows education alone produces modest change. Finally, measure behavior, such as documentation quality or audit error rates, not only who attended, and use results to plan the next round.
Related HCP 517 sample papers
Other HCP 517 week samples
- HCP 517 Week 1: Hospice Compliance Program Elements
- HCP 517 Week 2: Hospice Policies and Procedures
- HCP 517 Week 4: Documentation and Reporting
- HCP 517 Week 5: Compliance Communication Plan
- HCP 517 Week 6: Presenting the Compliance Program
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HCP 517 Week 3 questions, answered
What does HCP/517 Week 3 usually ask for?
Assignments usually ask students to design compliance training and education for a chosen sector, including audiences, role-based content, methods, frequency and measures of effectiveness.
Where can I find a free HCP 517 Week 3 sample paper?
The hospice training plan appears above and can be read without charge, with a note beside each session. A plan written for the roles in your own workplace comes free as a first paper.
Do educational meetings change clinician practice?
A Cochrane review of 215 studies found that educational meetings probably slightly improve compliance with desired practice, with a median improvement of about 4 percentage points compared with no intervention.
What are the most common hospice survey deficiencies?
A federal review of hospice surveys from 2012 to 2016 found the most common deficiencies involved poor care planning, mismanagement of aide services and inadequate patient assessments.
Should compliance training be the same for all employees?
No. Everyone needs core content on the code of conduct and reporting, but effective programs add role-specific training on the risks each job actually creates.
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