Question

The policy-making process involves various branches of government along with private entities such as interest groups. Select a health issue of interest and describe the process of policy making from the idea phase to becoming a law.

Answer 1

Nurses must understand that there will be competing priorities, existing policies and legislation that will act as barriers, competition for scarce resources, conflicting positions on the subject. This will assist you to understand forces, use them to your advantage, and thereby advocate successfully. The session will introduce you to systems thinking in relation to policy development and analysis processes, political and legislative processes.

We call, organizations systems, which means open systems, we accept that an organization interacts with its environment. The health system is very much an open system. When wanting to influence decision makers, you need to understand that they operate within an open system and they are influenced by many factors. The job of the advocate is to ensure that everything influencing the decision makers is understood and considered when developing a plan of action to influence them in the making of policy. The health needs of a specified population, health insurance policies may be designed to cater to the same target groups as those catered by the social welfare sector. The health policies have significant budgetary implications for governments.

You should understand the policy development process so that you can plan the type of input you need in order to have an impact on the final policy. You need to identify the policy problems and define and the policy agenda set. Policies are products of the political context, which are developed. It is useful to understand policy formation as a social and political process. The policy is adopted and enacted, which is brought into force, by state or federal legislation.

It is the mechanism where the policies are brought into practice or implemented, it is then written in the legislation or policy document which is turned into a reality.

The policy making process, includes monitoring, analysis, criticism and assessment of existing or proposed policies. This covers their content, their implementation and their effects. Evaluation is designed to help governments to implement policies in an effective and efficient manner.

A good example of non rational choice is the political decision not to act on prevention activities.

Governments are not risk averse but notoriously averse to change, the public sector is aware of the crisis for years. It is quite clear that early action could have saved lives at reduced costs and political disapproval. On the other hand, the dramatic death of one child with an uncertain connection to cyberbullying, results in huge support for far reaching legislation change.

The decision to prevent very few deaths and not to act to prevent many deaths is a clear predictive failure of the rational choice thesis, this would predict that a low risk, high benefit action will always trump a high risk, low-benefit response.

This occurs because people are psychologically loss averse. If you frame an issue as a loss there is much greater probability of action than if you frame it as a potential benefit. Our failure to be rational, results in gravely misallocated resources.

This argument offers a rational argument, as opposed to rational choice. The implication is that people are rational, but limited in cognition, resulting in anomalies from the traditional rational model.