How to Approach the BSN335 Assignment
The “Spent” simulation hit differently than you expected. Now you have two parts to write, a community resource table to fill, and questions that go deeper than any textbook answer. Here’s how to think through it — clearly and correctly.
📋 Need a fully completed BSN335 template? Our nursing writers can handle both Part 1 and Part 2.
Get Expert Help →What This Assignment Is Actually Testing
Person-centered care assumes a patient has the bandwidth to engage — to make decisions, set goals, and participate in their own health management. Poverty removes that bandwidth, one impossible trade-off at a time. This assignment asks you to feel that gap, then think critically about what it means for nursing practice.
This isn’t a textbook question with a textbook answer. BSN335 is testing whether you can connect structural social realities to nursing philosophy — and whether you can move beyond the glossy version of person-centered care to something more honest about what it requires.
The “Spent” simulation puts you in the shoes of someone navigating job loss, homelessness, and near-zero resources for 30 days. Then it asks you to reflect. Then it asks you whether person-centered care is even possible in that context. That third question is the one most students underwrite. Don’t.
Part 2 adds a practical dimension: researching real community resources in your area for food, utility assistance, and housing. This isn’t filler. It’s asking you to think like a nurse who will actually refer patients to these services — which means knowing they exist, what they require, and how to reach them.
The Spent Simulation
An interactive poverty simulation by Urban Ministries of Durham. You make daily financial decisions with $1,000 and 30 days. Available free online.
Part 1
Three written questions. Complete sentences required. Professional tone. No formal citations required but your answers should show you’ve engaged with the CMS definition.
Part 2
A community resource table: 3+ resources each for food, utility assistance, and housing. Name, description, eligibility, and contact info for each.
The Template
Download the template from your course portal. Both parts go in the same document. Submit the completed file — not a separate document.
Breaking Down the Spent Simulation Before You Write
If you haven’t done the simulation yet, do it before you write a single word of Part 1. Your answers are supposed to reflect your actual experience of the simulation — the choices you made, the moments it got uncomfortable, the decisions you didn’t expect to face. Fabricating this will show.
Here’s what Spent is designed to do: it puts you in a situation where every decision has a hidden cost, and the “right” choice is often unavailable. You might face questions like whether to sell your car (which gets you to work), skip a doctor’s visit (which could get worse), or take a payday loan (which traps you in debt). There’s no clean answer. That’s the point.
Before You Start the Simulation
Take notes as you go. Write down which decisions you struggled with, which ones surprised you, and which ones felt impossible. Your Part 1 answers will be much stronger if you’re drawing on specific moments rather than a vague memory of “it was hard.” The simulation only takes about 15–20 minutes but gives you plenty to work with.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2023), 37.9 million Americans were living in poverty in 2022 — the number your assignment cites. That context matters for your Part 1 Question 3 response. This isn’t a hypothetical exercise. The patients you’ll care for include people navigating exactly these trade-offs, every day.
Question 1 — Your Initial Thoughts and Feelings
The question: “Before the activity starts, you find out you lost your home, your job, and your savings, and you are down to your last $1,000. What were your initial thoughts or feelings before you even start the activity?”
This is a reflection question. It’s not asking you to analyze poverty in America. It’s asking you to be honest about your gut reaction before you clicked start. Most students jump straight into explaining the problem. Don’t. Ground it in your actual emotional or cognitive response first, then connect it.
Start with your honest initial reaction
Were you confident you’d manage? Anxious? Did you immediately start calculating whether $1,000 was a lot or a little? Your first instinct before you made any decisions — that’s what this question is asking for. Name it specifically, not vaguely. “I felt overwhelmed” is weaker than “I immediately started calculating whether $1,000 would cover a month’s rent and realized it probably wouldn’t.”
Connect your reaction to your assumptions
Your initial thoughts reveal your assumptions — about money, about resources, about what options exist in a crisis. Did you assume there would be a safety net? Did you feel like the situation was temporary and fixable? Those assumptions are worth naming because many of your future patients will not share them.
Briefly connect to empathy as a nursing skill
This question is the entry point for the broader theme of the assignment. One or two sentences connecting your initial emotional response to what it means for how you’ll approach patients in poverty — that’s enough. Don’t write a paragraph on person-centered care here. Save it for Question 3.
Question 2 — Your Choices and How You Prioritized
The question: “Every ‘Spent’ journey is different depending on the choices you made. Describe your choices. On what did you choose to spend money and what did you decline? How did you decide to prioritize those decisions?”
This is specific to your run. If you skipped healthcare to keep your car, say that. If you took a payday loan, explain why. The professor knows every journey looks different — they’re not checking for a “right” answer. They’re checking that you actually engaged with the simulation and can articulate your reasoning.
What to cover in this answer
Structure your answer around three things
- What you chose to pay for — and why those felt non-negotiable
- What you declined or sacrificed — and what that cost you beyond money
- The decision logic you used — survival-first? Longest-term return? Least bad option?
The deeper point this question is probing: how did you prioritize when every option had a downside? That’s the daily reality for people in poverty — and it directly affects how they interact with healthcare. A patient who chose rent over medication last month isn’t non-compliant. They were doing exactly what you did in the simulation.
Your answer should connect your specific choices to that insight. Not in a heavy-handed way, but enough to show you made the link. Two to three solid paragraphs is the right length here. Don’t pad it.
Don’t generalize away from your own choices
Students often drift from “here’s what I did and why” into “here’s what poor people generally experience.” The question is asking about your choices in your simulation run. Stay grounded in the specific. You can connect to broader implications in one or two sentences at the end, but the core of this answer should be personal and particular.
Question 3 — Is Person-Centered Care Possible in Poverty?
This is the one that requires actual critical thinking. Most students answer yes or no and move on. The stronger answer holds the tension.
Person-centered care asks patients to be active participants in their own health decisions. Poverty systematically limits the conditions under which active participation is possible. Your job is to explain what that means for nursing practice — not just acknowledge it.
The CMS definition is built into the question: person-centered care helps patients manage their health care through tools and services aligned with their preferences and values. The operative words are preferences and values. When you’re choosing between groceries and insulin, your preference isn’t really relevant — it’s been overridden by survival math.
How to structure a strong answer
Define what you mean by “possible”
Person-centered care in its ideal form — full patient participation, aligned preferences, coordinated care teams — is harder to deliver when a patient is in poverty. But that doesn’t mean nursing can’t try to apply its principles. The question is about where the model breaks down and what nurses can still do within those constraints. Start by acknowledging this complexity rather than collapsing into a flat yes/no.
Address access and cost directly
The question specifically asks you to discuss access to healthcare and cost of insurance. This is not optional — cover it. Address the barriers: uninsured rates, high-deductible plans, cost-sharing, transportation, time off work for appointments. Connect these to the simulation — what did your Spent experience reveal about how these barriers play out in real decisions?
Take a position and defend it
Don’t hedge the whole answer. A strong academic response has a claim. “Person-centered care is theoretically possible but structurally compromised when patients live in poverty” is a defensible position. So is “person-centered care requires us to address social determinants, not just clinical preferences.” Pick your lane and write toward it with evidence from the simulation and the CMS definition.
Connect to what nurses can actually do
End by bringing it back to nursing practice. What can you do — in an appointment, in a care plan, at discharge — to make person-centered care more real for patients in poverty? Think: community referrals, asking about social determinants, adjusting goals to fit realistic constraints, advocating for the patient in a system that often ignores economic reality.
The concept you need to weave in: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)
Even if the assignment doesn’t use the phrase, this is what the question is really about. Poverty is a social determinant of health. Person-centered care that ignores social determinants is incomplete. Nurses who understand SDOH ask different questions, make different referrals, and set different goals with their patients. This is the conceptual thread that ties the Spent experience to your nursing role — and using this framing will strengthen your answer significantly.
Part 2 — How to Research Community Resources That Actually Hold Up
You need at least 3 resources in each of three categories: food, utility payment assistance, and housing assistance. That’s a minimum of 9 resources total. For each, you document the name, a brief description of services, how to qualify, and contact information.
The emphasis here is “research your community.” Local resources. Not national websites. National programs are fine as a starting point, but your professor wants to see that you know what’s available where you live — because that’s where your future patients will live too.
Where to find verified, current resources
| Category | Where to Search | What to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Food Resources | Feeding America (feedingamerica.org) food bank locator; local food pantry networks; county social services website; 211.org | Food banks, SNAP enrollment assistance, WIC offices, meal programs for specific populations (seniors, children) |
| Utility Assistance | LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) — find your state office at acf.hhs.gov; local utility company hardship programs; community action agencies in your county | Who administers LIHEAP locally, income eligibility thresholds, whether there’s a separate crisis program for shutoff prevention |
| Housing Assistance | HUD.gov housing counseling agency search; local housing authority website; community legal aid organizations; area homeless coalitions | Emergency rental assistance programs, Section 8 waitlist status, transitional housing, eviction prevention hotlines |
211.org is your fastest starting point
Dial 2-1-1 or visit 211.org and search by your zip code. It’s a free, nationwide social services directory that pulls up local programs by category. It won’t give you everything, but it’s a fast way to find organizations you can then look up individually to verify eligibility requirements and contact info.
What the template wants for each resource
| Field | What to Write | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Name of Resource | The actual organization or program name — not just “food bank” | Being too generic (“local food pantry”) without a specific name |
| Brief Description of Services | What they provide, who it’s for, how often (weekly food boxes, one-time crisis assistance, etc.) | Copy-pasting from a website without tailoring to the actual services offered |
| How to Qualify | Income threshold (if any), documentation required, residency requirements, whether an appointment is needed | Leaving this blank or writing “contact for eligibility” — find the actual criteria |
| Contact Information | Phone number, address, website, hours if listed | Including a website URL that leads to a dead page — verify it before submitting |
Completing and Submitting the Template Correctly
Download the template from the course portal link before you start writing. Don’t create your own document format — the template is what gets submitted, and your professor will be looking at the template structure.
The assignment says no references are required for Part 1
But your Part 1 answers still need to sound professional and show engagement with the CMS definition of person-centered care that’s quoted in the question. You don’t need a reference list. You do need to demonstrate you understood and applied the definition, not just restated it.
Pre-submission checklist
- Part 1 — three questions answered in complete sentences, professional tone throughout
- Q1 — specific personal reflection, not generic statements about poverty
- Q2 — actual choices from your simulation run, with reasoning for each prioritization
- Q3 — clear position on person-centered care + poverty, access/cost discussed, nursing implications included
- Part 2 — minimum 9 resources (3 per category), all fields completed for each
- Resources are local or community-specific, not just national program websites
- Contact information verified — phone numbers and websites checked
- Submitted as the original template file, not a copy-paste into a blank doc
Mistakes That Cost Marks on This Assignment
| ❌ The Mistake | Why It Hurts | ✓ The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Answering Q3 as a pure yes/no without nuance | This question is designed to provoke critical thinking about a genuine tension in nursing practice — a flat yes or no misses the point entirely | Acknowledge what makes person-centered care harder in poverty, then say what nurses can still do within those constraints |
| Not doing the actual Spent simulation | Q1 and Q2 require you to describe your personal experience and choices — this cannot be faked credibly | Do the simulation first. Take notes. Write from your actual run, not from reading about what the simulation is like |
| Listing national programs only in Part 2 | The assignment says “research your community” — national SNAP or HUD pages are starting points, not answers | Find the local office, food bank, or agency that delivers the service in your zip code and document that specific organization |
| Generic statements in Q1 (“I felt sad for poor people”) | The question asks for your thoughts and feelings before you started — not a policy statement about poverty | Describe your actual cognitive and emotional response to the scenario as it was set up — what did you think when you heard you had $1,000 left? |
| Skipping the access/cost piece of Q3 | The question explicitly asks you to “discuss access to healthcare and cost of insurance or care” — this is not optional | Dedicate at least one paragraph to how cost and access barriers interact with person-centered care ideals for patients in poverty |
| Incomplete resource entries in Part 2 | Half-filled rows with missing eligibility info or dead links suggest you didn’t actually research the resource | For each resource, verify the info before entering it — call if needed, check that the website loads and has current content |
Frequently Asked Questions About This Assignment
The Assignment in Plain Terms
The Spent simulation isn’t just an exercise in empathy. It’s a setup for the harder question: what does person-centered care actually look like when the conditions for it barely exist? Your professor wants you to sit with that question, not tidy it up with a feel-good answer about holistic care.
Do the simulation. Write from your actual experience. Take Q3 seriously — it’s where the marks are. And for Part 2, do the research properly. Verified, local, specific. Those are the resources your future patients will actually use.
For students who need a fully completed template — Part 1 reflections, Q3 critical analysis, and local Part 2 resources — our BSN assignment help team has you covered.