When I think of nursing, I think of advocating for our patients. When I think of nurses being involved in the development of health care policy, I think of nurses advocating for everyone who will benefit from the policy. With advocating for public policy my biggest barrier is time, “advocacy is time-consuming and requires a significant commitment on the part of the nurse” (J., M. D., B, G. D., Freida, H. O., & T., O. E. (2015). According to the article, “Factors influencing nurses participation in health policy-making process”, “findings of present review revealed that insufficient knowledge on the health policy making is one of the important reasons of nurses’ non-involvement in health policy making” (Hajizadeh, Zamanzadeh, Kakemam. 2021).
These two barriers are reasons why many nurses don’t get involved in policy making in my opinion. We often are too busy to take the time to be involved in policy making. We have families, full time jobs, work extra hours just to make ends meet. Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system, it only makes sense that we get more involved because often, we are the ones who put the new policies into action. Not knowing how healthcare policy is developed is another barrier that goes along with not having enough time to invest in developing healthcare policy. As nurses we tend to stick with what we know how to do and developing new healthcare policies typically isn’t one of those things.
Nurses should be more involved with developing healthcare policy because we see how theses polices affect patients daily. We are familiar with our populations needs within our communities. We would be hugely beneficial to the development of new healthcare policies.
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