Healthcare
"The value of collaboration among various health professionals in promoting community health. How can you, as a nurse, influence legislators and policy makers, who have little or no knowledge and experience related to health care, to make wise and effective decisions regarding community health?"
Influencing legislators requires deft skills of communication, patience, and creativity. Nurses need to rethink their roles within their health care organization and within the community. A collaborative care approach ensures the empowerment of nurses, who are no longer viewed as assistants to doctors. Instead, nurses play a singular role in the community and are responsible for promoting public health and welfare. To communicate with and influence politicians and policy makers, nurses need to learn about community profiling. Demographics, which are related to epidemiology studies, can be translated into data that lawmakers can understand. Economic issues will be of utmost importance to legislators and therefore nurses need to know how to quantify data and put together proposals that are attractive and feasible to implement. Focusing on one community ensures that nurses become experts in the health care issues related to a given area. For example, some regions may have a high population of retired seniors. Nursing homes, residential care facilities, and home health care will be core issues on the agenda for representatives in that area. In areas with substantial populations of non-native English speakers, a nurse might need to lobby for a greater wealth of bilingual health care services.
Community nurses are also becoming increasingly aware of the issues related to health care access including the growing number of underinsured or underinsured citizens. When communicating with lawmakers who have little first-hand knowledge of what health care costs are like or how health care integrates with the community, nurses need to focus on the issues that legislators understand. Policies related to access to health care can be framed in ways that achieve direct and immediate results. For example, a nurse might propose a strong network of community health and outreach centers that provide information on preventative care in multiple languages. Similarly, a nurse might work with local politicians to improve quality of life factors such as greater opportunities for sports, bicycling, and healthy food. Nurses need not bog down their proposals with jargon. Instead, they can apply the fundamental tenets of collaboration and cooperation to all their communications.
