This Assignment puts you in the position of a practicing policy analyst again. Your task for this policy case is to apply assessment techniques to a case study. Your objective is to explore how forms of analysis inform and affect solutions to an environmental problem.

This Assignment asks you to write a memo that does the following:

Explains principles of risk, life-cycle, and cost-benefit assessments, with a focus on how they help determine the amount of environmental protection that should be permitted or required; and
Explores how alternatives assessment’s politically engaged and inclusive approach to solutions development can change the range of solutions considered.
You will achieve this objective by working on a case of your choice that you find complex and politically interesting.  Impact Assessment Environmental Issues Memo Essay Paper

Directions for Your Policy Memo

Write a 6-8 page memo offering assessment guidance for your selected policy. The goal of this memo is to explain the assessment techniques and then discuss how they can inform good policy.

In your memo, provide a solid description of these techniques and the kinds of insights that they provide. Your memo should culminate in a recommendation based on this question:

Should the selected policy place more emphasis on technical assessment or on alternatives assessment?
The memo should be divided into three sections (see below) and answer the questions as follows.
Section 1: Unit 6 Impact Assessment (a.k.a. Technical Assessment)

In Section 1 of your memo:

Explain how a probabilistic assessment, a life-cycle assessment, and a cost-benefit assessment would assess the effectiveness of your selected policy. As part of your description and discussion, offer an example solution for each type of assessment. Your discussion should focus on the logic and process of carrying out the assessment, but you are free to provide computational examples.
Conclude this section by explaining the limitations of this approach. (Note: as part of your discussion, you may summarize criticisms of technical assessment methods from your readings or from class lecture notes.)
Section 2: Unit 7 Impact Assessment (a.k.a. Alternatives Assessment)

Technical analysis often attenuates the range of apparent solutions. They are based on a particular perspective on a problem, however if stakeholders do not agree with a characterization of a problem they may never agree with the proposed solutions (). Review this reading for an example of an alternative assessment.

In Section 2 of your memo:

Explain what an alternatives assessment is and why it might lead to radically different solutions to a technical assessment. In your answer offer an example that would be relevant to you selected policy.
Section 3: Recommendation and Implications for Assessment

Examining differences in assessment helps reveal two challenges in policy formulation. The first is developing appropriate comprehensive yet coherent solutions to environmental problems. The second is creating a democratic process that facilitates multi-stakeholder input.

In Section 3 of your memo:

Make a recommendation consistent with your discussion in that recommendation, discuss whether you recommend a technical assessment or alternate assessment and why.
Reflect on your recommendation in light of the stakeholder assessment you completed for your Unit 4 assignment. How does the assessment technique you recommend relate back to, or even upend, stakeholder assessment?

Impact Assessment: Environmental Issues Memo

There are many workplace environmental problems in healthcare. Most of these require solutions that are only feasible after proper in-depth analysis. For this, different assessment techniques are used. The purpose of this paper is to outline how different forms of analysis can be used to inform the decisions made n solving healthcare workplace environmental problems.

Section 1: The Assessment Technique of Appreciative Inquiry (AI)

The appreciative inquiry model was established by David Cooperrider as an organizational evaluation tool that concentrates on positive changes inside the institution rather than what is incorrect. It diverts focus away from the negative problem-solving and deficit-thinking attitude that many healthcare leaders and managers use. Rather, it focuses on the more positive and helpful behaviors inside the healthcare institution. With AI, the focus shifts to a grateful investigation of the positive tales within the healthcare organization. As a result, creative talent, a sense of belonging, and pride arise. A completely new perspective on the organization and its endless potential emerges, allowing the future to be built on past triumphs in the care context.

As a result, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) embraces a positive assessment of individual and communal contributions within the care environment, highlighting what is good and what is functioning. It then tries to do more of what has previously worked. The first phase or step in appreciative inquiry is the choosing of a favorable topic about which the others spin. The remaining four stages are as follows: discovery, dream, design, and destiny (Stevenson, 2019). Strategic planning, as in this example, is a major use of the appreciative inquiry methodology. The finding and dream stages are the emphasis of this particular care setting’s analysis. Impact Assessment Environmental Issues Memo Essay Paper

Discovery

The stage of discovery in AI analysis entails the acquisition of data and the examination of positive narratives within the organization. The goal is to investigate success stories presented by interviewing people of interest inside the organization. Discovery through AI therefore unearths beneficial experiences of individuals within the firm, with the goal of duplicating the same for future success (Stevenson, 2019). In this case, tales were gathered through interviews conducted following the identification of partners to be questioned and the development of the questionnaire. In this care setting, two anecdotes stood out for their positivity: one from a nurse manager and the other from a registered nurse clinical nurse leader.

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The nurse leader described how she succeeded in bringing the physician who had denigrated one of her ward nurses to apologize to the victim for saying she did not use her intellect.  The incident had taken place in front of the clients. Ostensibly, the doctor’s terrible statements were prompted by the nurse’s failure to notify him that the client had denied the procedure ordered. When the aggrieved nurse complained about this to the nurse manager, she stated that she was aware that the doctor’s comments were not conducive to the psychological safety of the workplace. As a result, she felt compelled to take action to prevent this from happening again in the future. She immediately addressed the doctor and demanded that he personally apologize to the nursing staff that he offended.

The RN on her part described how she avoided a potentially volatile workplace violence situation between a client’s family and a junior nurse on her team during an afternoon shift. The relative felt that his patient was being ignored and turned his rage on the junior nurse. The registered nurse, as the clinical nurse leader on the shift, saw the signals of potential physical violence and called the relative away to keep him out of trouble. She felt relieved that this was due to her dispute settlement instruction and that her acts maintained the psychological health and safety of workers and patient safety.

These narratives are about quality and safety because a healthcare employee who is intimidated and pressured out by being denigrated and unwelcome is more likely to make mistakes. This endangers patient safety and reduces the quality of patient care provided since the nurse is unable to focus fully on her job. The substantiation for these accounts can be found in the remarks in the events journal on the exact dates of these two scenarios. The positive elements in these narratives are that healthcare work environments may be made more welcoming, and transformational leadership in nursing is critical for providing quality nursing care and improving client safety.

Another source of proof that verifies my care setting’s positive core is that every year, a magnificent prize is given to the best charge nurse and the best nurse generally of the year in my institution. In the first of the two instances, the registered clinical nurse leader was able to collect the award for best nurse altogether that year for her involvement in preventing physical violence in the workplace. This is a great motivator since it recognizes and acknowledges effort and energy, which stimulates the repetition and reproduction of such beneficial behaviors.

Dream

            The dream stage is the beginning of the process of imagining what could be. It entails considering options that are not currently considered. The interviews performed during the discovery phase resulted in the aforementioned two success stories in the care setting. As a result, if these narratives get entrenched in the organization’s culture, they will undoubtedly drive the institution’s success in the future (Stevenson, 2019). The dream initiatives of optimistic and feasible quality and safety improvement objectives for this care environment are to enfranchise nurses to feel free to report any potential threat to them and colleagues, whether physical or psychological, to place only nurse managers who have displayed exceptional transformational leadership in management positions, and to always take a collaborative approach when creating any proposed amendments in the care setting by seeking the nurses’ viewpoints.

Meeting these objectives will result in ethical and culturally sensitive advances in quality and safety, because a nurse who feels safe in the workplace will respect autonomy, perform only what serves the patient in beneficence, and not damage the patient in nonmaleficence. The ideals of autonomy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence are all significant in bioethics (Campbell, 2017; Haswell, 2019). The nurse will also provide holistic care for the patient, which includes respecting the patient’s cultural values and practices. Finally, the suggested goals will be consistent with the care setting’s mission, vision, and values, with the mission being to offer the greatest nursing care possible and the vision being to be the leading care setting in the country in terms of quality and safe nursing care. Integrity, fairness, honesty, and justice are among the ideals of the care setting. It is both fair and just to have transformational nurse leaders and to empower nurses to freely vent their issues.  Impact Assessment Environmental Issues Memo Essay Paper

Section 2: SWOT Analysis as an Alternative Assessment Technique

In the context of an organization, SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Internal organizational strengths and weaknesses are more common than external opportunities and dangers. This analysis will consequently look at the care setting’s internal strengths and weaknesses, potential for growth and improvement, and external risks to its existence (Yoga, n.d.). A SWOT analysis is typically performed prior to strategic planning. In this scenario, a SWOT analysis of this care setting’s quality and safety goals was performed.

The institution’s capabilities allow it to achieve great organizational productivity (Yoga, n.d.). After data collection and data analysis, the strong points of this care setting include having a devoted medical personnel that is very industrious and involved, having an in-house training and skill development scheme for the staff to make them more competent and reliable, having the latest state-of-the-art innovative healthcare technologies for improved patient outcomes, adopting healthcare information systems and recruiting a nurse informaticists, and using telemedicine services to reach an increased percentage of patients.

Multiple opportunities for this care setting have also been found. One is that there is an expanding population of middle-class persons in the surrounding area who could become part of its market area. This would ensure a more consistent supply of income for service and quality enhancement. The other was a social marketing opportunity that would inspire the care setting to increase the quality of its offerings. The last one was the rapid advancement of smartphone apps. This would imply that many more individuals might now be accessed virtually via telemedicine network via their cellphones.

Limitations in a healthcare facility usually result in worse quality of care and higher costs (Yoga, n.d.). The observed shortcomings in this care environment were a high staff turnover that affects patient safety and quality of care provided, a big number of the workers that requires developing skills to have the proper skill mix, and limited financial resources for staff career development. This has an effect on the quality of care provided and endangers the patients’ safety.

Threats have an impact on the organisational effectiveness (Yoga, n.d.). In this care context, the threats were intense competition for clients from new competitors, a decline in Medicare reimbursement, and state restrictions on nurse practitioners’ practice denying them full practice authority or FPA. Restricted practice ensures the NP is not allowed to make many treatment decisions unless she meets and agrees with the supervising physician in a cooperative partnership.

The SWOT analysis was employed as an assessment method in this investigation. The primary conclusions were that there is an unusually big proportion of nurses leaving their jobs. This has an impact on nurse-patient ratios and, as a result, the quality of care provided. Another difficulty was that many of the nurses and other employees needed to be upskilled to keep their abilities current. This fact alone poses a risk to the patient’s safety because the person caring for them may be unfamiliar with the devices they are utilizing. Impact Assessment Environmental Issues Memo Essay Paper

Section 3: A Comparison of the Two Approaches and Recommendation

The Appreciative Inquiry method of analysis differs greatly from the SWOT method. It generally takes a positive approach to the process, whereas the SWOT model takes a pessimistic approach. As a result, I would recommend the AI technique in this scenario. When I use the AI technique, I anticipate receiving positive feedback. It is expected to uncover flaws while employing the SWOT paradigm. Anecdotes and bits of stories and programs that have been successful in the past are the types of data and evidence I expect to find with AI. Facts and figures are the types of data I anticipate from the SWOT analysis. The commonalities between the two are that they are both intended to improve organizational function and to aid in strategic planning. The fundamental distinction between the two is that one seeks positive input while the other seeks negative criticism.

Communication skills, humility, empathy, vision, and positivism are all sought leadership attributes and skills in AI. Communication, integrity, accountability, and delegation are the four SWOT factors (Enfroy, 2022). These traits will assist them facilitate a project since the AI person will be personable and approachable, but the SWOT person will be required to offer simply facts and maintain integrity. The only evident similarity between the two is that both require good and efficient communication abilities. This could be because they both require proper and effective communication with their staff.

Conclusion

A number of what may be called environmental issues always plagues the workplace. The healthcare workplace is no different. To correctly and effectively solve these workplace environmental issues, an assessment is done using a number of available techniques. This paper has looked at two of these assessment techniques namely SWOT analysis and appreciative inquiry or AI.

References

Campbell, L. (2017). Kant, autonomy and bioethics. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 3(3), 381–392. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jemep.2017.05.008

Enfroy, A. (February 6, 2022). 11+ leadership qualities: A list of skills to make a good leader. https://www.adamenfroy.com/leadership-qualities

Haswell, N. (2019). The four ethical principles and their application in aesthetic practice. Journal of Aesthetic Nursing, 8(4), 177-179. https://doi.org/10.12968/joan.2019.8.4.177

Stevenson, H. (2019). Appreciative inquiry. Cleveland Consulting Group, Inc. http://www.clevelandconsultinggroup.com/articles/appreciative-inquiry.php

Yoga, A. (n.d.). Strategic planning and SWOT analysis. Academia: Accelerating the World’s Research. https://www.academia.edu/download/48999112/SWOT_in_Healthcare.pdf

Impact Assessment Environmental Issues Memo Essay Paper