Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly. Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice. Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

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To Prepare: Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected. Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs. The Assignment (4-5 pages): Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Add a section to the paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following: Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples. Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.

Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.

The selected health care issue is poor public perception of health care since it has implications for care delivery. The issue is noted to make patients resistant to advice from medical personnel with lower qualification, overreliance on subclinical care, shift towards considering health care as a commodity (Anderlini, 2018), and political rivalries that politicize health care issues (Vogenberg & Marcoux, 2018). Although the negative impacts of poor public perception create a concern in health care delivery, there are competing needs that turn the issue into less of a priority.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

The first competing need is poverty and the capacity to pay for health care. Poverty and ill health are closely linked. In fact, the two have a bilateral relationship that results in a vicious cycle. Persons living in poverty and unable to pay for health care will be unable to access the required healthcare at the right quality to improve health. In addition, poverty causes ill health as poor persons suffer from a myriad of health compromising intangible and tangible deprivations.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices. This results in ill health that continues to affect the individual’s financial status by increasing the susceptibility to catastrophic health care costs and loss of income as the individual recuperates. Besides that, ill health exacerbates poverty through disposal of assets and increased debts. Also, poverty results in disadvantaged material living conditions that drive ill health by causing psychological stress and poor lifestyle choices that is linked more closely with the burden of non-communicable diseases. Poverty creates the perception that good health is expensive and difficult to achieve (Chung et al., 2020).Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

The second competing need is the availability of adequate staffing of medical personnel in the face of staff availability and fiscal pressures. The lack of adequate staffing is noted to result in high readmissions, patient dissatisfaction, longer lengths of stays and more adverse events – all things that can negatively impact the bottom line and care quality.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices. Additionally, inadequate staffing increases nurse burnout so that more nurses leave the profession with high turnovers thus exacerbating the staffing problem. Inadequate staffing creates the perception that the delivered care quality is low (Raingruber, 2017). In this respect, poverty and capacity to pay for health care, and adequate staffing of medical personnel are two competing needs that impact public perception of health care.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.

An important practice that has influenced public perception of health care is communication policies. The organization actively collects patients’ opinions about the services offered at the facility as well as ratings of staff members with a focus on identifying significant areas of weaknesses that can be targeted for improving public perception. Patients leaving the facility are typically presented with a short exit questionnaire that seeks to evaluate their perception of the health care services offered at the organization. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.The patients’ opinions are collected because the organization understands that understanding how the public perceives the medical services and staff is fundamental for delivering high quality care that meets the needs of patients (Raingruber, 2017). In addition, the organization acknowledges that the background of each patient and expectations differentially influences their perceptions. Once confronted with the actual care delivery, the individual would become more certain in his/her opinions. This makes an exit questionnaire the ideal tool for collecting opinions of patients on their experiences in the organization. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.Once the completed questionnaires are collected, they would be routinely evaluated and thematic analysis conducted to identify significant areas performance requiring improvement. Data is continually collected even as changes are implemented to enable continuous improvement efforts.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices. Besides the use of exit questionnaires, the organization has implemented a policy requiring nurses to have conversations with the patients during rounding and ask if they have any other concerns that they need addressed. The results of the conversations are included in the nursing notes that are then coalesced by the nurse managers and acted upon to improve patient perception (Raingruber, 2017).Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.

The identified policy makes use of communication (exit questionnaire and conversation) to collect the opinions of patients. The policy has ethical considerations by requiring that patients be presented with relevant and complete information that is accurate and true even as it avoids language that exaggerates, discriminates and/or manipulates. This policy has four significant strengths. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.Firstly, it ensures that the presented information is accurate so that patients have reason to have good perception of the organization as they trust that it would always be truthful. Secondly, it ensures that the communication avoids withholding crucial information so that patients are better informed and enabled to make informed decisions (Truglio-Londrigan & Lewenson, 2018). Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.Thirdly, it allows the organization and its staff to maintain a relationship with the patients by creating the perception that they (organization and staff) are concerned about their (patients) welfare. Finally, it allows for communication activities to continue without offending the patients as conversations with nurses collect information in a subtle manner even as the exit questionnaires collect information at the patients’ convenience when they are relaxed and not hurried. Although the policy has significant strengths, it presents a weakness. It is not unusual for information collected from patients to be selectively misquoted by deliberately omitting unflattering or damaging comments. This is intended to present a better, but untruthful picture, of the organization and medical personnel (Truglio-Londrigan & Lewenson, 2018).Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.

Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies.

There is a need for all nurse personnel and other staff who communicate with patients at the facility to be routinely subjected to communication training on what they should and should not do. In order to communicate effectively, the staff must have a good awareness of the communication principles with a focus on ethics. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.The should be aware of the need for responsible, concise and truthful communications. Understanding the needs of patients and how to improve their perception of the organization and its staff relies heavily on optimal person-to-personal communication so that stakeholders understand each other and activities occur in the most efficient manner possible (Renpinning, Gebhardt-Taylor & Pickens, 2016). In fact, this is critical for confusion to be mitigated so that every stakeholder is on the same page.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices. In addition, the communication training should focus on transparency and openness as this presents the perception of integrity and trustworthiness that would improve the organization’s reputation. Besides that, the training should consider any potential roadblocks that would influence how information is received and understood. Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.There is a need for understanding how to attenuate and mitigate the communication roadblocks to ensure that the information being communicated is fully understood. This includes using the right language and jargon, and taking into account the patients’ level of language fluency. Also, it takes into account technology accessibility and know how to operate certain applications, such as access to smartphones with internet access and how to communicate with social media platforms (Truglio-Londrigan & Lewenson, 2018). Overall, there is a need to staff to be routinely subjected to communication training in order to better collect public opinion so as to improve public perception.Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices.