Research
Your team will use Patton’s policy analysis process to evaluate a policy from a healthcare organization. While you are able to choose a company policy to make the focus of your analysis, it will be subject to the approval of your instructor. CAUTION: Please don’t begin your policy analysis until you have obtained the instructor’s approval of the chosen policy. Failure to obtain prior approval may result in you having to scrap the original policy and set the team back. Below are the six steps your team will following in completing your policy analysis. Where do you get the company policy? It is recommended that each team use an actual policy that has been in use at a place of employment for several years. Once you have completed your policy analysis, you are asked to recommend an appropriate course of action with regard to the policy. Should the policy be retained and amended; replaced with a new policy; or discontinued. In any event, your recommendation with rationale should be supported with your findings.
There is NO prescribed format for the final deliverable or page length requirement. Since you are being asked to put forth a formal recommendation with appropriate support, your team should prepare a white paper. The instructor will be looking for evidence that the team has adequately and explicitly addressed each component of the policy analysis. The product will need to demonstrate the level of analysis and synthesis consistent with that expected from members of a healthcare management team. You ARE NOT expected to follow the APA writing style in the preparation of the final deliverable, with two exceptions. First, if you use sources to support content within the deliverable, you will need to properly in-text cite the source or sources used in the narrative of the document. Second, you need to properly format your sources in the references page. The instructor will not prescribe a format for the white paper, since he or she will be assessing your professional judgement in the development of this deliverable. Remember, as a general rule, you want to keep business related correspondence brief, error free, and professional in form, style, and content.
Policy Analysis
Based on the ideas and approach followed by Carl V. Patton there exists a very simple pattern of ideas and points to be considered in doing an actual policy analysis. The six steps are as follows:
Verify, define, and detail the problem. The most relevant and important of them all because many times the objectives are not clear or even contradictory from each other. A successful policy analysis will have allocated and identified clearly the problem to be resolved in the following steps. This is the foundation for an efficient and effective outcome of the whole process. The analyst must question both the interested parties involved as well as their agendas of the outcome. Locating the problem in such a way that eliminates any ambiguity for future references.
Establish evaluation criteria. In order to compare, measure and select among alternatives, relevant evaluation criteria must be established. In this step it must be considered cost, net benefit, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, administrative ease, legality, and political acceptability. Economic benefits must be considered in evaluating the policy. How the policy will harm or benefit a particular group or groups will depend on the number of option viable Options more difficult than others must be considered but ultimately decided through analyzing the parties involved with policy. Political and other variables go hand in hand with the evaluation criteria to be followed. Most of the time the client, or person or group, interested in the policy analysis will dictate the direction or evaluation criteria to follow.
Identify alternative policies. In order to reach this third step the other two must have been successfully reached and completed. As it can be seen, the policy analysis involves an incrementalist approach; reaching one step in order to go on to the next. In this third step understanding what is sought is very important. In order to generate alternatives, it becomes important to have a clear understanding of the problem and how to go about it. Possible alternatives include the “do nothing approach” (status quo), and any other that can benefit the outcome. Combining alternatives generates better solutions not thought of before. Relying on past experiences from other groups or policy analysis helps to create a more thorough analysis and understanding. It is important to avoid settling prematurely on a certain number of options in this step; many options must be considered before settling into a reduced number of alternatives. Brainstorming, research, experiments, writing scenarios, or concept mapping (Links to an external site.) greatly help in finding new alternatives that will help reach an “optimal” solution.
We choose harassment and retaliation in healthcare
