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Annual Review of Public Health Mar 2017Large-scale public policy changes are often recommended to improve public health. Despite varying widely-from tobacco taxes to poverty-relief programs-such policies... (Review)
Review
Large-scale public policy changes are often recommended to improve public health. Despite varying widely-from tobacco taxes to poverty-relief programs-such policies present a common dilemma to public health researchers: how to evaluate their health effects when randomized controlled trials are not possible. Here, we review the state of knowledge and experience of public health researchers who rigorously evaluate the health consequences of large-scale public policy changes. We organize our discussion by detailing approaches to address three common challenges of conducting policy evaluations: distinguishing a policy effect from time trends in health outcomes or preexisting differences between policy-affected and -unaffected communities (using difference-in-differences approaches); constructing a comparison population when a policy affects a population for whom a well-matched comparator is not immediately available (using propensity score or synthetic control approaches); and addressing unobserved confounders by utilizing quasi-random variations in policy exposure (using regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, or near-far matching approaches).
Topics: Health Policy; Humans; Public Health; Public Policy
PubMed: 28384086
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031816-044208 -
Social Science & Medicine (1982) May 2021'What does 'The Public' think?' is a question often posed by researchers and policy makers, and public values are regularly invoked to justify policy decisions. Over...
CONTEXT
'What does 'The Public' think?' is a question often posed by researchers and policy makers, and public values are regularly invoked to justify policy decisions. Over time there has been a participatory turn in the social and health sciences, including health technology assessment and priority setting in health, towards citizen participation such that public policies reflect public values. It is one thing to agree that public values are important, however, and another to agree on how public values should be elicited, deliberated upon and integrated into decision-making. Surveys of public values rarely deliver unanimity, and preference heterogeneity, or plurality, is to be expected.
METHODS
This paper examines the role of public values in health policy and how to elicit, analyse, and present values, in the face of plurality. We delineate the strengths and weaknesses of aggregative and deliberative methods before setting out a new empirical framework, drawing on Sunstein's Incompletely Theorised Agreements, based on three levels: principles, policies and patients. The framework is illustrated using a recognised policy dilemma - the provision of high cost, limited-effect medicines intended to extend life for people with terminal illnesses.
FINDINGS
Application of the multi-level framework to public values permits transparent consideration of plurality, including analysis of coherence and consensus, in a way that offers routes to policy recommendations that are based on public values and justified in those terms.
CONCLUSIONS
Using the new framework and eliciting quantitative and qualitative data across levels of abstraction has the potential to inform policy recommendations grounded in public values, where values are plural. This is not to suggest that one solution will magically emerge, but rather that choices between policies can be explicitly justified in relation to the properties of public values, and a much clearer understanding of (in)consistencies and areas of consensus.
Topics: Administrative Personnel; Health Policy; Health Priorities; Humans; Public Policy; Technology Assessment, Biomedical
PubMed: 33882440
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113892 -
Home Healthcare Now 2020
Topics: Health Policy; Humans; Nursing Staff, Hospital; Public Health Nursing; Public Policy; United States; Workforce
PubMed: 31895902
DOI: 10.1097/NHH.0000000000000847 -
Pediatric Clinics of North America Feb 2023Research has led to major achievements in public policy and child health. Despite the gains, the need for research to inform policy remains paramount against a backdrop... (Review)
Review
Research has led to major achievements in public policy and child health. Despite the gains, the need for research to inform policy remains paramount against a backdrop of inadequate public health investments, health inequities, and public skepticism toward science. However, the translation of research into child health policy has often been slow due to misalignments in incentives between researchers and policy makers and a paucity of conceptual models to inform translation. This article outlines barriers to translation, provides examples of discordance between evidence and policy, summarizes models to inform translation, and offers strategies to improve translation of research to policy.
Topics: Child; Humans; Child Health; Motivation; Health Policy; Public Policy; Public Health
PubMed: 36402465
DOI: 10.1016/j.pcl.2022.09.012 -
International Journal of Environmental... Jun 2021Water is an unpredictable and often overallocated resource in the American West, one that strains policy makers to come up with viable, and politically acceptable...
Water is an unpredictable and often overallocated resource in the American West, one that strains policy makers to come up with viable, and politically acceptable policies to mitigate water management concerns. While large federal reclamation projects once dominated western water management and provided ample water for large scale agricultural development as well as the urbanization of the West, water engineering alone is no longer sufficient or, in some cases, a politically acceptable policy option. As demand for water in the West increases with an ever-growing population, climate change is presenting a more challenging and potentially untenable, reality of even longer periods of drought and insufficient water quantity. The complexity of managing water resources under climate change conditions will require multifaceted and publicly acceptable strategies. This paper therefore examines water policy preferences of residents in four western states: Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho. Using a public survey conducted in these states in 2019, we examine preferences pertaining to infrastructural, education, incentives and regulation specifically examining levels of support for varying policies based on climate change and environmental efficacy beliefs as well as geography, demographic variables, and political ideology. Results show support for all water policies surveyed, with the exception of charging higher rates for water during the hottest part of summer. The most preferred water policies pertained to tax incentives. Some variation of support exists based on gender, education, environmental values, efficacy, state residency and belief in anthropogenic climate change.
Topics: Climate Change; Environmental Policy; Oregon; Public Policy; Washington; Water
PubMed: 34208930
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18137000 -
International Journal of Health Policy... 2023Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) kill 41 million people a year. The products and services of unhealthy commodity industries (UCIs) such as tobacco, alcohol,...
BACKGROUND
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) kill 41 million people a year. The products and services of unhealthy commodity industries (UCIs) such as tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and beverages and gambling are responsible for much of this health burden. While effective public health policies are available to address this, UCIs have consistently sought to stop governments and global organisations adopting such policies through what is known as corporate political activity (CPA). We aimed to contribute to the study of CPA and development of effective counter-measures by formulating a model and evidence-informed taxonomies of UCI political activity.
METHODS
We used five complementary methods: critical interpretive synthesis of the conceptual CPA literature; brief interviews; expert co-author knowledge; stakeholder workshops; testing against the literature.
RESULTS
We found 11 original conceptualisations of CPA; four had been used by other researchers and reported in 24 additional review papers. Combining an interpretive synthesis of all these papers and feedback from users, we developed two taxonomies - one on framing strategies and one on action strategies. The former identified three frames (policy actors, problem, and solutions) and the latter six strategies (access and influence policy-making, use the law, manufacture support for industry, shape evidence to manufacture doubt, displace, and usurp public health, manage reputations to industry's advantage). We also offer an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of UCI strategies and a model that situates industry CPA in the wider social, political, and economic context.
CONCLUSION
Our work confirms the similarity of CPA across UCIs and demonstrates its extensive and multi-faceted nature, the disproportionate power of corporations in policy spaces and the unacceptable conflicts of interest that characterise their engagement with policy-making. We suggest that industry CPA is recognised as a corruption of democracy, not an element of participatory democracy. Our taxonomies and model provide a starting point for developing effective solutions.
Topics: Humans; Politics; Public Policy; Commerce; Policy Making; Health Policy
PubMed: 37579378
DOI: 10.34172/ijhpm.2023.7292 -
International Journal of Health Policy... 2023
Topics: Humans; Global Health; Health Policy; Public Policy
PubMed: 37579384
DOI: 10.34172/ijhpm.2023.8124 -
ANS. Advances in Nursing Science 2018
Topics: Humans; Nursing Care; Public Policy
PubMed: 29389724
DOI: 10.1097/ANS.0000000000000199 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Jan 2024The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. Although there is a large...
The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. Although there is a large body of research on psychological determinants of public policy acceptance, these determinants have not yet been synthesized into an integrative framework that proposes hypotheses about their interplay. In this article, we develop a review-based, integrative public-policy-acceptance framework that introduces the desire for governmental support as a motivational foundation in public-policy acceptance. The framework traces the route from problem awareness to policy acceptance and, ultimately, policy compliance. We propose this relationship to be mediated by a desire for governmental support. We integrate numerous key variables assumed to qualify the relationship between problem awareness and the desire for governmental support, such as control attributions, trust, and value fit, as well as the relationship between the desire for governmental support and policy acceptance, such as perceived policy effectiveness, intrusiveness, and fairness. We exemplify the use of the proposed framework by applying it to climate policies.
Topics: Humans; Public Policy; Trust
PubMed: 37470506
DOI: 10.1177/17456916231180580 -
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health... May 2022It is widely recognised that the process of public health policy making (i.e., the analysis, action plan design, execution, monitoring and evaluation of public health...
It is widely recognised that the process of public health policy making (i.e., the analysis, action plan design, execution, monitoring and evaluation of public health policies) should be evidenced based, and supported by data analytics and decision-making tools tailored to it. This is because the management of health conditions and their consequences at a public health policy making level can benefit from such type of analysis of heterogeneous data, including health care devices usage, physiological, cognitive, clinical and medication, personal, behavioural, lifestyle data, occupational and environmental data. In this paper we present a novel approach to public health policy making in a form of an ontology, and an integrated platform for realising this approach. Our solution is model-driven and makes use of big data analytics technology. More specifically, it is based on public health policy decision making (PHPDM) models that steer the public health policy decision making process by defining the data that need to be collected, the ways in which they should be analysed in order to produce the evidence useful for public health policymaking, how this evidence may support or contradict various policy interventions (actions), and the stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. The resulted web-based platform has been implemented using Hadoop, Spark and HBASE, developed in the context of a research programme on public health policy making for the management of hearing loss called EVOTION, funded by the Horizon 2020.
Topics: Health Policy; Hearing Loss; Humans; Policy Making; Public Health; Public Policy
PubMed: 35025752
DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3142503