Public Policy and Health Care Essay
Topic 5 DQ 2
Does accreditation improve organizational sustainability in health care organizations? Why or why not?
Topic 6 DQ 1
Through its collective effort, public policy and health care have been embedded together for decades. There are organizations such as National Health Council (NHC) that has been advocating for patient quality care, policy change, and so much more. Should public policy be used to drive changes in health care and organizations? Why or why not? Support your view.Public Policy and Health Care Essay
Topic 6 DQ 2
Public policy exerts significant influence on health care through regulations that address nearly every aspect of health care. These regulations are based on the health care needs of the community stakeholders. In the absence of public policy and regulation of the health care industry, could the effectiveness of health care organizations be sustained at current levels? Why or why not? Could effectiveness be improved? Why or why not?
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Since the principal aim of medicine is to combat illness and alleviate suffering, medicine is not traditionally considered an agent of global public policy. Yet health care is in fact an underutilized tool to address the economic, social, and cultural disparities that define poor health in many regions. Poor health, in turn, fuels social vulnerabilities and discord, as illness decreases individual and community productivity and disrupts family and social structures. The broad consensus that improvements in population health can reduce poverty and contribute to long-term economic growth and development offers some hope. Interventions for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis, and vaccine-preventable illnesses, for example, have all improved economies and demonstrated that, just as disease transcends borders and can adversely affect regional economies, sound investments in health promotion can have a positive effect. The challenges are significant: currently, one-third of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day; six million children die before the age of five from preventable causes, including infectious diseases, malnutrition, and violence; chronic conditions such as coronary disease and malignancies contribute increasingly to global mortality; and at the same time, the world is striving to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. To address these challenges and the complex interplay of health, poverty, education, governance, and environment, the field of medicine must become a partner to global public policy, global health care policy, and foreign policy.Public Policy and Health Care Essay
The Program in Global Health Policy and Social Change aims to embrace this complex intersection and help develop the needed partnerships among the fields of global health, public policy, and diplomacy. The Program works collaboratively across departments and institutions and engages undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and key policymakers in discourse to provide innovative solutions to global public policy problems.
Policy decisions affect population health. This is not limited to policies in the health sector. In fact, policies from other sectors have been shown to have a much more profound impact than those in health. This is because policies in sectors like housing, education, transportation, income, employment, social assistance, and others affect what are called the social determinants of health. The challenge is to recognize what the effects are on these determinants, upon what groups, when they occur, how they affect some more than others, and so on. Public Policy and Health Care Essay
| It is clear that in order to build healthy public policies we must understand as best we can the effects of policies, both the intended effects and the unintended ones. Often we can find downstream effects in unexpected places and policies with relatively clear outcomes in one area can cause ripples in other sectors. These can be positive or negative. |
It is thus important to consider a few factors that are essential to seeing the connections between public policies and population health.
Complexity
The first and most important is that when we talk about the social determinants of health we must acknowledge that social determinants are usually deeply woven into social structures with multiple factors influencing them. For example, poverty and wealth are strongly linked to overall health at the population level, but income and the factors influencing it is a highly complex social phenomenon. Public Policy and Health Care Essay
Embedded
Even for relatively straightforward instances of policy, it is difficult to examine effects in isolation. Other factors will typically influence effects, and isolating a policy from the social context within which it unfolds (i.e. eliminating background “noise”) will yield a limited picture of a policy’s effects as they occur among people in real environments. The “noise” of context is relevant to understanding effects. For example, a policy which was thought to have certain effects may have different effects by the same measures five years later, because the society (or some other factor) has changed.
Multi sectoral in nature
This consideration follows from the first two. When we accept that social determinants have multiple influences from multiple sectors, we have by definition embarked on a multiculturalism issue. By thinking multilaterally, we must explicitly expand the circle of discourse around an issue to consider different ways of framing the problem, different underlying values, and different sets of assumptions, definitions, methodologies and limits. When working across sectors, it is more clearly necessary to take a step back to frame issues and discover (as much as possible) a collective understanding to build collective responses. Public Policy and Health Care Essay
How to proceed, then?
One option for finding an appropriate balance is to look for a mixture of scientific evidence, local knowledge of important contextual factors, and examples of promising practices. These elements can all be informed by a range of perspectives, expertise, values and advice from different sectors and stakeholders. By navigating among the values of rigour and openness, between the general and the specific, between the most persuasive evidence and the importance of how effects unfold in specific situations, we can better address the challenges presented above. Public Policy and Health Care Essay