Policy Process: On Long-Term Care Part II

Policy Process: on LONG-TERM CARE Part II Policy Process 3292 Health care and nursing is more complex today than ever before. New technologies and ever-growing population demands a much more disciplined and organized health care industry (Abood, 2007). This is possible when there are policies, rules and regulations about medical procedures. The medical industry involves some policies today that a person could never imagine few centuries ago. For example there are policies for sperm donation, use of organs after death for research purposes and saving human genome in labs.

In the same way there are many other medical procedures that are in policy making phase for example abortion, long-term care, state sponsored insurance of immigrants etc. (Jones, 2000). This paper discusses the policy making process of long-term care. The stages of policy making discussed here are evaluation, analysis and revision. Evaluation stage Some topics are too controversial that they cannot become a favorable policy. While others are too important that societies cannot afford to waste time in not making policy or delaying it.

The policy of long-term care includes insurance privileges, services to deal with disability or chronic diseases. The policy is made after due diligence so that no critical portion of the issue is unsolved (Willinsky, 2006). The long-term care is critical since it deals with offering those that cannot help out themselves and are dependent on others. The evaluation of long-term policy should determine if the patient or individual is still dependent on others to look after him or not.

The evaluation should judge whether the patient himself or herself feels satisfied with the services or not. The team that evaluates the policy making process of long-term care should find how the policy brings well-being in the lives of those in need. The evaluation of long-term care policy making should also try to understand if the extra burden is put on the health care providers. The burden should be fairly distributed across the system and no one should be paying extra costs.

The nurses neither are to be unfairly asked to participate in the system nor should be the patients overcharged. The evaluation should find what rewards or relaxations are offered to the sponsors of long-term care. The team should also look for other gaps in the system and the policy itself. If the insurance providers ask for undue requirements to be fulfilled, there must be a check on these requirements and these should be reported to the policy makers so that they include parameters dealing with it.

The economic environment should also be evaluated so that the costs associated with policy are managed. Analysis stage After having evaluated the policy making process, the team analysis the impact of policy and the level of influence it will have. The policy analysis might involve quantifying the results of evaluation and finding the scope. The team can for example find that in some city in a state, there will be hundred people benefitting from the policy while about 350 people will be benefitting in another city in a different state.

Thus the policy makers will be able to compare what they assumed on the basis of data while making legislation and what the analysis of policy making finds. The analysis also tells the cost of implementing policy. There are monetary as well as non-monetary costs. The policy can for example require patient to live in a healthy place locate far from his grandchildren. Thus the team should analyze how this will impact the decision of patient and will he end up availing services or not.

Therefore, such a policy will be of no use if it benefits people only theoretically and they are not ready or able to avail those services. Crimm (2006) suggests that the policy should find and analyze its impact on minorities. A policy only favoring major societal group or one gender or one race should not be acceptable. It should speak on behalf of and for benefit of all citizens equally. The long-term policy should also be analyzed in terms of expected years of service.

It should tell for how many years the patient can utilize the service. The policy may choose to offer different services packages to different needs of people. The patients needing lifelong service for above 20 years should be categorized differently than the patients availing the policy benefits for a year or two. Without this analysis, the policy might fail sooner or later. Thus the policy as well as the environment of policy will be analyzed to recommend changes and modifications in the policy.

Revision stage The prior stage of analysis serves as foundation for the revision of policy. Not every policy needs revision. On the other hand some policies might need to be totally re-written. The policy revision serves as a means to adjust the areas and aspects of the policy that were either less productive or counterproductive. The revision might be slight change like adding the name of both genders and the races explicitly. Alternatively, it can involve abolishing many components of policy and forming new ones.

The policy should be ideally revised with the collaboration or professionals in law, healthcare, nursing, human rights etc. these efforts will ensure that the policy is comprehensive and it does not ignore any group of society. The revision of a policy can be based on analysis via observation or survey. The survey-based revision is often more reliable since it tells in writing how the patients and industry feel about the policy and in their view if it seems to help or not (Morone, Litman, Robins, 2008).

People often offer wise suggestions that can make it very easy to deal with policy and make it operational. It is far easier to deal with racial and gender biasness today at policy making levels than it was years ago. People are more knowledgeable thus they are likely to accept different races yet the policy makers cannot rely on assumptions they need to find if any racial or minority discrimination exists. Than they need to correct it by changing the clause in the policy.

The age difference should also not be unjustly handled. The patients should.