How to write a Health Policy and Advocacy (Solved)

How to write a Health Policy and Advocacy (Solved)

Health advocacy has emerged in recent years to be the most effective strategy to address problems facing patients and nurses. The primary responsibility of health advocacy is to help patients deal with their health problems and healthcare professionals in diverse settings (Porche, 2023). This process helps patients to access affordable, effective, high-quality healthcare services. During the advocacy process, certain factors can affect how one gets priority on the agenda while others can hinder the process. This discussion identifies these factors and how they can be mitigated during the advocacy process.

Policy change occurs when an opportunity for change opens and certain contextual factors can influence this process. Advocates for policy change should understand the context around these opportunities for change in order to select strategies for advocacy. The first factor that can promote advocacy priority on the agenda is the impact of the observed problem on patients or nurses. The need to address the healthcare issue can affect how quickly the advocate engages interested parties (Williams et al., 2018). For example, policy issues that address important areas like the availability of medication to patients will be prioritized. Such areas of advocacy require immediate attention to improve the distribution of medication and to remove any barriers to access that can affect patient outcomes.

To gain the commitment of leaders and other important legislative members, advocacy work must include things like setting meetings with key leaders. Having the political know-how and personally knowing these leaders can influence advocacy priority on the agenda (Cullerton et al., 2018). For example, having a good relationship with the governor and other political leaders can help one in setting meetings to air grievances and strategies for policy change. Additionally, understanding the advocacy process can help the nurse to identify and engage the right people.

The political environment during the advocacy process is another contextual factor observed to have a huge impact on policy change (Porche, 2023). Neoliberalism is an ideology that affects policy change because of the interest of sitting parties. Sometimes the political environment can favor the advocacy process because of the sitting government. Some politicians may be open to strategies that can influence policy change and work closely with advocates to improve policy change processes (Dawes, 2020). Such an environment is likely to promote getting advocacy priority on the selected agenda.

Certain contextual factors can hinder priorities on matters of policy advocacy and change. The first factor that might work against advocacy priority is the lack of adequate support from organizational leadership (Dawes, 2020). Good leadership is required to support advocates of policy change. These leaders help to introduce the advocates to important political figures with a lot of influence on matters of healthcare policy. Inadequate support of the agenda can demoralize involved parties and work against prioritizing the agenda.

Another contextual factor that can work against prioritizing policy agenda is time. Most agendas require a lot of time to present and follow up making it difficult to achieve the desired results (Cullerton et al., 2018). The busy schedule of nurses may make it difficult to follow up on policy agendas and priority may be given to those that may seem to be less time-consuming. Overall, nurses advocate for the right social policies to promote the health of populations, and this process is affected by a broad range of factors.

References

Cullerton, K., Donnet, T., Lee, A., & Gallegos, D. (2018). Effective advocacy strategies for influencing government nutrition policy: A conceptual model. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity15(1), 1-11.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-018-0716-y

Dawes, D. E. (2020). The political determinants of health. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Porche, D. J. (2023). Health policy: Applications for nurses and other health professionals (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Williams, S. D., Phillips, J. M., & Koyama, K. (2018). Nurse advocacy: Adopting a health in all policies approach. Online Journal of Issues in Nursing23(3). https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No03Man01

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