Question

why has nursing made policy and political competence such a strong part of nursing curriculum and role development.

Answer 1

The purpose of healthcare policy and procedures is providing standardization in daily operational activities.Policies and procedures are essential in providing clarity in dealing with issues and activities that are critical to health and safety, legal liabilities and regulatory requirements. The importance of healthcare policy and procedures is not disputed but the way they are managed will vary from one organization to another. The importance of policies and procedures manuals may not be as apparent as it should be. Nurses try to develop powerful solutions, to help manage policies and other documents in order to improve the productivity and efficiency of a healthcare facility.

Policy in healthcare is vitally important as it sets a general plan of action used to guide desired outcomes and is a fundamental guideline to help make decisions. The purpose of healthcare policy and procedures is to communicate to employees the desired outcomes of the organization. They help employees understand their roles and responsibilities within the organization. In the healthcare environment specially, policy set the foundation for the delivery of safe and cost effective quality care.

With the continued increase in new regulations such as the Affordable Care Act, HIPAA, athe burden of setting policies and effectively communicating these to the employees has become burdensome.There have been repeated calls over several decades for nurses to have a bigger role in influencing health and social policy. The nurses at all levels need to see policy and politics as something that they should be obligated to shape rather than something that happens to them over which they have no control. In today’s era of an increasing emphasis on evidence informed policy, nurses still have considerable work to do, Since the WHO policy process was found wanting due to the over-reliance on anecdote and lack of the use of evidence, the World Health Organization (2012) has produced detailed guidance on how evidence is to be used in the development of guidelines. Consequently, the use of evidence has increased and all WHO policy guidelines have to be substantiated through the inclusion of graded evidence tables. However, the barriers facing nursing is the difficultly that nurses have in accessing the research evidence despite this observation, things are changing. Increasingly, nurses are gaining access to the evidence either through educational institutions or through their employers who have provided access to database search facilities and e-Journals. In low-income countries, special arrangements have been made through the World Health Organization HINARI initiative, where health workers can have similar access.

These are steps in the right direction, but they need to be extended to all nurses if they are going to play their full role in developing and influencing politics, policy and practice.