Research Paper on Population Health Policy Analysis

Introduction

Population health seeks to advocate for affordable, accessible, accurate, and quality healthcare for a recommended group of individuals following previous health outcomes, known patterns of health determinants, and recommendations of policies and intervention measures. Dealing with known health outcome challenges require medics and other relevant stakeholders to come up with evidence-based solutions and mitigation measures through policy formulation. Policies and interventions are designed to cater to certain healthcare inequalities and inconsistency suffered by a marginal group of the population requiring improving the access rate and cost-effectiveness of health care. Identification of various health care concerns helps draw policy principles to help reduce population's health-related issues of a particularly vulnerable element (Keyes & Galea, 2016). This paper will discuss the maternal and child health policy adopted to improve issues concerning family, women reproductive health, infant, children and adolescents healthcare, as well as antenatal and postnatal special health needs.

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Although the rate of maternal deaths had reduced considerably by 2015 globally, pregnancy, childbirth, and child mortality remain warranting in third world countries where delivery complication, severe bleeding, infection, high blood pressure, and mother-child disease transmission among other manageable issues threatens the lives of the mother and the newborn. In the pursuit to meet the Sustainable Development Goals globally by 2030, world developing countries through the Division of Reproductive Health are governed by the maternal and Neonatal, And Child Health policy geared towards eradicating maternal and child mortality (Joseph & Marrow, 2017). The policy advocates for affordable and accessible reproductive health, maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality through accelerated developmental strategies of mother safety and child survival during delivery. The goal of the policy is financially sound by outreaching emerging maternal healthcare needs, using evidence-based interventions applicable to the continuum care of pre-conception therapy, pregnancy and childbirth as well as postpartum period reducing mortality. The maximized health outcomes realized through the policy's effectiveness enhances primary family health care systems for optimized birth outcomes for mothers and newborns, prevention and cure of childbirth-related ailments, and thriving community support. The policy cost-effective benefits improve global health and reduced transmission of mother-to-child communicable diseases and infections, and responsive vaccine tools. Again, the policy advocates for improved child and mother nutritional health care that goes off - bond to provide essential foods, supplements, and training to ensure healthy living (Steel, 2015).

Maternal health caregiving is faced by different ethical dilemmas instigated by theory and practices in the midwives, perinatal or neonatal nurses as they engage with the reproductive health of the mothers and the newborns. Ethical concerns lack distinct ceiling on the good, proper, right or fair practitioner conduct that influences the nurses' ethical, legal, and political bindings in healthcare giving. Ethical concerns determine the nurses' judgmental capacity and actions in the maintenance, restoration, promotion, and improving human body balance through moral rights of duty. Professional ethics abides the nurses to solve the moral dilemmas relating to maternal health and child health care (Hurlimann, Pena-Rosas, Saxena, Zamora, & Godard, 2018). For instance the policy advocate for professionalism and legality of practitioners in dealing with certain situations revolving around prenatal and postnatal health care as well as executing safety and legal child welfare. At certain instances where mother and/or child lives are threatened due to practice or other concerns, the nurses are mandated to conduct ethical judgments within the law and moral standards. An example is the patients' rights and legal statute on incidences of abortion; nurses are expected to act within legal and moral ethics as well as upholding their professionalism based on the different situations of the maternal health dilemma.

Maternal and Child Health Policy is designed to cater to women, newborns and young children's health care especially in developing countries like Africa and Asia where child mortality and childbirth complication are on the rise. It is important to draw guidelines to reduce the alarming levels of childbirth complications, child morbidity, and nutritional concerns facing communities living below the global poverty threshold. The policy is an improvement of various recommendations and past intervention measures on infant mortality and poverty. The policies' tenets seek to eradicate practitioners' ethical challenges by offering affordable and accessible maternal healthcare to the vulnerable communities at reduced or no cost. The policy is designed to increase healthcare by extending childcare to certain ages lowing infant mortality.in countries like Malawi and Kenya, implementation of the Maternal health and infant healthcare policies boost the number of women who deliver in health facilities and reduce child mortality through firm programs like beyond-zero programme. The policy is internationally adopted and designed to ensure that manageable childbirth is safe and free from avoidable infection as well as free from negligible errors. Prenatal nutrition and general health care for pregnant women is one among the many successes that have contributed to the achievement of the objectives of the policy aspirations (Aderemi, 2016).

Advocacy strategies to increase the benefits of the Maternal and Child health care policy requires the active involvement of the stakeholders in various avenues to assess the policy's stipulations, knowledge, and capacity using evidence-based interventions. It is essential to assess the level of awareness any population has on the policy to ensure that the community receives the proper and accurate information regarding the benefits and opportunities provided for by the policy. Community awareness requires nurses and other maternal health practitioners need to have cross relationships to ensure that the available resources and information gets its way into the population timely and accurately. Advocating of loopholes and shortcomings of the policy to avoid generalization of the international community requires having custom-made policy amendments to ensure that the international recommendations are tailored to fit in a particular state's health care situations unlike the common bracketing maternal and child care concerns without factoring major topographical issues peculiar to a specific population in any given community.

Nurses are obligated to uphold the moral, professional and religious sensitivity as they deal with patients from different walks of life. In the promotion of maternal and child healthcare as stipulated by the policy guidelines and intervention strategies, nurses require to respect the religious, cultural, and moral orientation of their patients. Therefore their professionalism requires factoring the individual situations as they execute their duties upholding respect and moral responsibilities. Safeguarding Christianity in maternal health requires respect of life both of the mother and the unborn child. The nurses are expected to understand the various circumstances that compromise maternal and child health with respect to Christianity and moral ethics. The morality of practice require a distinct understanding of right and wrong as well as ensuring that nurses conduct respect and value human dignity/life. Though, the generalization of the religious perspective in healthcare provision, individual cases apply differently for nurses to consider their professionalism, life respect and preservation to ensure that each scenario is treated with respect, secrecy, and ethics.

Conclusion

In conclusion, understanding the moral and professional requirements for nurses to execute, implement and uphold the Maternal and Child Health Care policy its essential to understand the context and situations of the health needs of individual patients as well as the principles and guidelines stipulated by the policy internationally. Understanding the policy requirement and guidelines requires nurses to value human life in order to ensure that the maternal and child health care stipulations are not an only universal checklist of professionalism but a way of improved health care and preservation of life.

References

Aderemi, R.A. (2016). Ethical Issues in Maternal and Child Health Nursing: Challenges Faced By Maternal and Child Health Nurses and Strategies for Decision Making. International Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research;5(2):67-76

Hurlimann, T., Pena-Rosas, J.P., Saxena, A., Zamora, G., & Godard, B. (2018). Correction: Ethical issues in the development and implementation of nutrition-related public health policies and interventions: A scoping review. PLOS ONE 13(2): e0192356. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192356

Joseph, D. Tiffany. & Marrow, Helen, B. (2017). "Health Care, Immigrants and Minorities: Lessons from the Affordable Care Act in the United States." Special Issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Co-guest Editors, published online June 12.

Keyes, KM, & Galea, S. (2016). Population Health Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Steel, D. (2015). Philosophy and the Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence, and Environmental Policy. Cambridge University Press, 256pp., ISBN 9781107078161\