Influencing Health Policy Report
Assessment overview:
This assessment task requires you to write a report for a relevant stakeholder on how to influence a specific health policy.
Requirements:
You are required to write a report that outlines how to influence a health policy of your choice.
It is useful to approach this assessment by thinking of yourself as a policy consultant that has been engaged by a particular stakeholder organisation to address a health policy relevant to their work.
| For this assessment you are required to identify a health policy that you would like to influence. Your chosen policy can be a different one to what you addressed in assessment task two or alternatively you can continue using the same policy.
Once you have identified a relevant health policy you are then required to draft a report for a specific relevant stakeholder organisation outlining what processes could be used to influence the policy and associated outcomes. |
Your report must include the following five elements:
- Identify your stakeholder
Choose a stakeholder. Once you have selected a stakeholder you will then need to identify a relevant organisation related to that stakeholder such as those policy actors discussed in Week 6. For example, if you are targeting GPs you should target a governing body such as Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). We encourage you to also think broadly about potential stakeholder organisations, which could include organisations such as, but not limited to:
- health-care sector, including professional bodies
- public or private organisations
- non-government organisations (NGO’s)
- representative organisations
Once you have identified your chosen stakeholder organisation, you are to address the following:
- Write a brief summary of your chosen policy.
You are required to briefly summarise your chosen policy including relevant background information that relates to your stakeholder’s interests.
- Investigate stakeholders who have influenced the policy relevant to your stakeholder.
Influential organisations are those who are vocal and have vested interests in the outcomes of the policy. As part of this, you should:
- identify relevant stakeholders;
- discuss their concerns in relation to the policy;
- discuss how their concerns may influence your chosen stakeholder’s position in regards to the policy.
- Determine the immediate and relevant implications and potential challenges of the policy for your chosen stakeholder.
This could be based upon concerns already raised, and what they mean for your stakeholder, or it could be other challenges that have not yet been raised.
- Provide recommendations to your stakeholder for future action.
For this section are you required to provide specific actions for your stakeholder to take to influence your chosen policy. In providing this information you should consider:
- Clearly articulate specific steps or actions for your stakeholder to take
- Provide rationale for your recommended actions
- Critique any risks associated with your recommendations
Your recommendation should be based on peer-reviewed scientific literature that you have sourced for yourself through literature and database searches; that is, scientific journal articles, papers, books and so on. You can also reference published government reports and publications, institutional reports and regulatory standards, and other similar official materials. You can also use general websites for information (such as media websites), where relevant. The report is to be written for a specialist health management audience, and as such should be written at an appropriate professional level, using specialised terms and concepts appropriate to this audience.
All work that includes the intellectual property (authored material) of others (including books, journal articles, magazines, news articles, images, tables, websites, social media, etc.) must be given appropriate attribution.
Assessment criteria
Your work will be graded according to the following criteria:
- Quality of critical analysis
- Evidence of research
- Implications for the stakeholder
- Recommendations and conclusions
- Writing, structure and presentation
- Referencing