The Concept of Health Policy

The Concept of Health Policy
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The Concept of Health Policy
An in-depth understanding of the operational environment marks the onset of effective outcomes. Dynamic industries such as healthcare require an extensive exploration of multiple issues, internal and external to clinical settings, which affect the overall outcomes. Bearing the multifaceted nature of contemporary healthcare, such a detailed understanding requires standardisation. The concept of health policy is a tool that stakeholders in healthcare employ to understand their operational environment. Superficially, health policy defines the scope of decisions or interventions that healthcare professionals undertake in their daily obligations. This paper employs Walt’s approaches of policy application to explore the concept of health policy for emergency physician professionals in the UK. The Walt approach of policy application is an extensive tool that should accord the emergency physicians a platform to understand the internal and external policy prospects that define the scope of their operations.
Walt Approach of Policy Application
The Walt approach of policy application is among the most popular models employed to understand the contemporary concept of health policy. The model is political and tends to understand health policy as a factor of the government and its various institutions (Cees et al., 2019). The Walt model differentiates the concept of policy by dividing it into two categories: high politics and low politics. High politics or macro-policies are the long-term policy inputs implemented by the state or the high political class to guide decisions or standards on a national grid. High policies often accommodate multiple sectoral interests. In healthcare, every department is generally covered in the confines of high political policies. The Walt model also categorises policies into low politics in which more specific aspects of an institution, a department, or an industry are explored (Power, Bury, & Ryan, 2019). Healthcare professionals in the emergency department, for instance, are subject to low political policies that are poised to affect the scope of their activities.
The political system dictates the need for synchrony between the low and the high political policies. A health policymaker must be aware of the constraints of policies to make them feasible and relevant to the operational environments. On some occasions, the efficiency by which policies impact inputs can elevate their applications across the political ladders. That is, a low politics policy can be advanced into a high politics policy, especially if such a policy constitutes outputs that match the needs of a wide area operational environment. Ultimately, bearing the dynamism of the operational environment, healthcare professionals should understand policies both within their areas of specialisation and beyond those areas.
High Politics Policies in UK’s Healthcare
UK’s healthcare bears a considerable affinity to high political policies. The Department of Health (DoH) form part of the stakeholders in national policy developments on healthcare matters. The participation of the department in national health issues stems fro...