HEALTH POLICY, POLITICS AND PERSPECTIVES 2
HEALTH POLICY, POLITICS AND PERSPECTIVES 2
Week #2 Assignment #2
Field Experience Log
January 19th, 2020
Field Experience Log
| Name of the event | Health policy / Importance of vaccination in early ages.
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| Sponsors: | Florida, Miami-Dade County. |
| Steps taken for preparation of the event | Creation of public awareness by · Magazines and newspapers · Use of posters · Social media channels Facilitation · Speakers · Funding |
| Place, date, time and length of hearing | The meeting was scheduled to take place at Mater Academy Charter Middle/High School on date 16th Jan 2020 starting from 10 a.m. to 12 noon. |
| Topic for discussion | The importance of vaccinating school children as a way of preventing communicable diseases. |
| Name of the participants | · World Health Organization representatives · Local leaders · Teachers · Parents · Children
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| Brief description of the testimony of the meeting | The meeting ended successfully. A range of issues was discussed including the feasibility of the policy and its perceived benefits. All the participants detested that they will cooperate during the period of policy implementation. Both the parents and teachers asserted that communicable diseases were alarming among the school children. The policy came at the convenient time and it would be essential at enhancing the health and wellbeing of their children.
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Policymaking is a process of setting out guidelines, rules and principles that are formulated and adopted by the party that need to achieve certain goals. It involves systematic stages of identifying the need of the policies, the parties to lead the process, gathering of information, drafting of the policy, stakeholder consultation, the approval stage and the implementation stage (Cui et al., 2017). Policymaking and its subsequent implementation are the best way of addressing the societal challenges, it encompasses a great number of people coming together to give a solution to the common problem that is affecting them. Thus, this paper discusses the analysis of vaccination policy for the school children.
Healthcare policies are prone to receive mixed reactions because of the influence it has on society. For this reason, thereof, there should be a systematic process that engages various stakeholders. This ensures that there is adequate consultation and thus making the implementation process as easy as possible. Notably, in areas where there is no consultation such policy may receive a total objection especially from the influential persons in the society including the politicians, church leaders, among others (Seither et al., 2019).
To ensure that the school children are safe from various infections, the state and county government came up with a vaccination policy for school children to secure their health. Various events financed by the state and county government were organized to as organized to educate the parents, teachers and children about the importance of vaccination policy (Seither et al., 2019). Notably, these events were scheduled to take place in various schools at both the national, county and local levels to seek public opinion about the formulated policy. In these, events members of the public were allowed to express their opinions. The reports were written by the school heads and submitted to the county and national government for decision making.
Over time, the policy was securitized by the interested parties who expressed divergent opinions about the value and the effectiveness of this policy. Overall, the vaccination policy for school children was considered an important way of preventing many of the communicable diseases. This because schools are social gathering that contains children from different backgrounds. Therefore, a trigger of any communicable infection spreads very fast. School children have a close interaction at various grounds including playing, during class sessions and thus increasing the likelihood of disease spread (Seither et al., 2019). In this case, if the infection is severe, it will cost the lives of many children and parents as well. For this reason, thereof, it is important to consider preventing the occurrence of such infections through vaccinations.
Vaccination of the school children is likely to be beneficial not only to the children but also to the entire society. The immunity of the children is lower than one of the adults. This subjects them vulnerable to many of the communicable diseases and thus compromising their health and wellbeing. Factoring on this, children will facilitate the communicability of these infections to the healthy populations including their parents and other society members (Cui et al., 2017). As a result, the entire society is affected something that could have been prevented through vaccination.
References
Cui, F., Lipin Shen, L. L., Wang, H., Wang, F., Bi, S., Liu, J., … & Miao, N. (2017). Prevention of chronic hepatitis B after three decades of escalating vaccination policy, China. Emerging infectious diseases, 23(5), 765.
Seither, R., Loretan, C., Driver, K., Mellerson, J. L., Knighton, C. L., & Black, C. L. (2019). Vaccination Coverage with Selected Vaccines and Exemption Rates Among Children in Kindergarten—the United States, 2018–19 School Year. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 68(41), 905.
