Essay Sample on Public Health Policy Interventions: Advantages & Disadvantages

Introduction

Public health policy refers to the plans and actions that are put in place through legislation that is intended to achieve a specific goal in healthcare. Public policy intervention in healthcare is initiated to tackle dominant problems through a common set of regulations. This paper will assess the advantages and disadvantages of using public policy level interventions in changing health behavior in the population.

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Advantages of Public Policy Level Intervention

Public Policy Level Intervention are Specific

The public policies have an advantage in reaching their overall goal of changing health behavior because they are specific and detailed to alter specific behaviors compared to the non-policy interventions (McDaid, Oliver, & Merkur, 2014). Therefore, due to high specificity, public policy intervention aimed at changing behavior is more successful.

Public Policy Level Intervention can Target a Large Number of People

Public policies application in changing health behavior are useful because they can target a large population compared to other initiatives that are not specific and policy in nature (Jepson, Harris, Platt, & Tannahill, 2010). Public policies can be able to deliver better results when the behavior in question affects a large number of the population.

Disadvantages of Public Policy Intervention in Changing Health Behaviors

It is Difficult to Assess the Outcomes of the Public Policy Intervention

Because the public policy intervention covers a large number of population and does not have specific measures of success, they are challenging to assess their overall effectivity. Determining policy success is essential in realizing the overall policy effectiveness in changing health behaviors (McDaid et al., 2014). When a large population is involved, it becomes challenging to measure its overall success.

Public Policy Interventions Involve Many Organizations Which are Difficult to Manage

Public policies involve many public and private organizations, and their success depends on the ability to coordinate them (Jepson et al., 2010). As such, the difficulty of managing the many organizations makes it ineffective as a means of changing health behavior due to diversity in objectives.

References

Jepson, R. G., Harris, F. M., Platt, S., & Tannahill, C. (2010). The effectiveness of interventions to change six health behaviors: a review of reviews. BMC public health, 10(1), 538. Retrieved from https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-10-538

McDaid, D., Oliver, A., & Merkur, S. (2014). What do we know about the strengths and weakness of different policy mechanisms to influence health behavior in the population? World Health Organization 2014 (acting as the host organization for, and secretariat of, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies). Retrieved from http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/270138/PS15-web.pdf?ua=1