Healthcare Policy

Respond to the following posts

1. Ashlie

Healthcare policies are crucial to an operating organization. Policies help aid an organization to provide standardized care on a daily basis (Duncan & Thorne, 2012). Having policies in place help assist employees with resolution to issues and activities that are critical to the health and safety and even legal liabilities of their place of employment (Duncan & Thorne, 2012).

If everyone were equally gifted, educated, motivated, healthy, and wealthy, would national healthcare policy be necessary? That is a good question. I feel national healthcare policies would still be necessary. I feel polices help protect the healthcare providers and organizations. I feel these polices help outline the care that should be given by each nurse regardless of their education, health, or wealth status. There are several ways to insert a foley catheter, but there is only one way to correctly insert a foley catheter. Having that policy helps ensure every nurse, every time, will perform that task the same and correct way.

Open access to health care would still create policy concerns. Regardless of the type of access permitted, policies are crucial and a must-have in the healthcare arena.

2. Amanda

Healthcare policy is vital in the sense that the policy outlines the general plan to achieve the desired health outcome. The plan dictates activities and decisions to be made in a bid to hit the set healthcare objectives. The primary goal of a healthcare policy, which makes it undisputedly essential, is that it aims at delivery of affordable and high-quality care (Godman, Malmström, Diogene, Gray, Jayathissa, Timoney & Campbell, 2015). If everyone were equally gifted, educated, motivated, healthy, and wealthy, would national healthcare policy be necessary? Yes, it would still be necessary. This is because a national healthcare policy stipulates how healthcare is to be made accessible to the citizens and how the healthcare services and programs will be made sustainable (Betancourt, Green, Carrillo & Owusu Ananeh-Firempong, 2016). On an individual capacity, it’s hard to make this possible irrespective of one’s education and wealth. Secondly, the policy ensures that people indirectly pay for healthcare through taxes, a practice that minimizes bureaucracy. In the event people were to fund their healthcare services through private companies and insurance firms, healthcare professionals such as nurses would have to deal with a lot of paperwork to authorize payment. Additionally, a national healthcare policy ensures that preventive measures against various diseases are in place to have a healthy population (Sallis, Owen & Fisher, 2015). An example of such an action is providing mosquito nets to families to avoid malaria and limiting air pollution by factories to prevent respiratory diseases such as asthma and bronchitis.

Would open access to health care still create policy concerns, given the wide geographic distribution of the population and location of providers for all geographic areas? Yes, it would. This is because a policy guiding on the standard quality of the health care provided to patients would be needed (Roski, Bo-Linn & Andrews, 2014). Open access to healthcare doesn’t guarantee high-quality healthcare services thus policy is vital. Secondly, a policy would still be needed so that the cost of getting the healthcare can be regulated (Stoddart & Evans, 2017).