Health Policy

Effect of External Environment on Policymaking Process

Stakeholders, regulations and accrediting healthcare agencies determine how to be efficient and exercise ethical standards in recruitment programs. As a result, the healthcare personnel encounter opportunities to get better pay, develop their careers and have quality higher education with better use of current technologies. Besides, nurses and doctors experience equal treatment in their places of work. Healthcare policymaking process can be centred on issues of migration of health practitioners to other parts of the world, in search of better paying jobs. In this regard, accrediting healthcare agencies from different countries, which experienced the greater migration of the healthcare practitioners, should be able to investigate why that happens and then assess the impact on service provision in healthcare (Seboni, 2009).

It is pertinent that the current information base allows stakeholders, regulators and policy makers to evaluate the virtual loss as a result of the migration of healthcare workers or other countries compared to the few migrations into the country. This will provide information like when physicians and nurse move from the private sector to the public services and vice-versa. Besides, it should offer information of practitioners leaving the professional totally to join other venture. The flow of professionals could be visible on the international scene yet it has very minimal numerical impact because of being replaced by employees from the private sector or from the colleges. Moreover, accrediting agencies should be aware that an uncontrolled or unmanaged movement of health workers outside a country could cause bad impact on the health systems efficiency or even erode the existing and future potential functionality of the country’s workforce pool (Seboni, 2009).

Recent Laws and Regulations on the Management of Health Care

Several countries have already set in place some policy reactions like developing programs that help the nurses to bond with their home county’s employment systems for a certain period of time after their graduation from the colleges to facilitate proper healthcare management. The processes of monitoring have not been able to help the government to tract down the graduating students getting into the workforce. Some strategists suggest that the use of tactics involving the use of money incentives and regulatory barrier would be more efficient in terms of policy response to healthcare management. It is also evident that:

“Encouraging development of new patient care models is a major objective of the new law. Within CMS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMI) came into being in 2011. (22) CMI’s mission is to develop and test new payment and service delivery models, intended to improve quality while reducing costs. Medical Homes are  just one of the new models, designed to transition primary care practices away from fee-   for-service reimbursement and toward capitated or bundled payments. Other models may  involve direct contracting with provider groups, use of comprehensive care plans to    coordinate care and services, and management of chronic illness to minimize the need for  high-cost services in acute care facilities” (Groszkruger, 2011) .

These strategies also act as impediments to the free movement of people discriminatively against the healthcare practitioners. However, some of the developing countries are striving to counter the push factors by addressing issues of poor pay for the health workers and increasing the courses in the higher learning institutions as well as developing more diverse care facilities so as to increase the career prospects in the field of healthcare (Seboni, 2009). Even though governments try to institute policies, laws and regulations to deal with poor working conditions and overworking the employees, job security issues and advancing as well as increasing the educational prospects are huge programs that pose greater challenge to the healthcare management.    

Accrediting Agencies’ Impact on Healthcare Management

Healthcare Quality Association on Accreditation (HQAA) and Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC) ascertains whether healthcare management operates according to the established health standards and policies (Seboni, 2009). In this regard, healthcare management standards are strictly followed. In summary, these accrediting agencies can as well work towards reforming the health delivery system, thus improving the healthcare management.