Essay on Florida House Bill 607

House Bill 607 was enacted to increase and allow the authorization of antiretroviral drugs by pharmacists. The Bill authorizes pharmacists to order and dispense either a specific amount or full course antiretroviral drugs without prescriptions. Also, the Bill excepts health care givers from the mandate to have step-therapy protocols or authorization for these drugs. While some health insurers would deny cover to pharmacists for lack of authorization, the 607 HB is designed to allow cover and other advantages (The Florida Senate, 2021). Under certain circumstances, the Bill allows pharmacists in Florida to dispense or order preexposure and postexposure prophylaxis drugs without prescriptions.

For direct care workers HB 607, in collaboration with the Health and Human Service Committee, ensures a creation of excellence within the health agency for various purposes. The Bill helps with the existing annual inservice training requirements, and requires the agency to provide rules to establish the program criteria (The Florida Senate, 2020). In most medically reserved areas, the law will help improve access to primary care for direct care workers. Besides, the law will increase the affordability of such services. For this reason, advanced practice registered nurses, certified registered nurse anesthetics and physician assistants will fully practice autonomy without requiring supervision.

In cases where regular policies fail, alternative policies are designed to correct an identified problem that was not fixed. Therefore, alternative policies are created from analyzing recurrent problems, or fail patterns from the original policies (Study.com, 2021). In this process, the research of impacts, effectiveness and consequences of the initial policy are analyzed. As alternative policies stem from an analysis, they take various forms in different stages of policy formation. First, a predictive analysis is carried out to propose a new solution to the identified problem. Further, the policy’s consequences and benefits are analyzed. Secondly, a descriptive analysis is introduced to assess the productivity of the alternative policy as predicted. An alternative public policy is beneficial since it seeks to address the problems that an initial policy failed at.

Importantly, an alternative policy investigates why the initial policy did not work and with that, helps in reaching a wider audience by fixing a problem. In addition, while most policies offer great benefits, there are reported disadvantages of alternative policies. For instance, both the descriptive and predictive analyses in an alternative policy may fail to address the initial problem (Lemke & Harris-Wai, 2015). To achieve its effectiveness, a number of stakeholder perspectives are put into consideration. Besides, stakeholder engagement has been incorporated in healthcare as an important methodology to improve decision making in scientific, public health, and clinical policies. In every step of the policy-making process, there is a needed integration of stakeholders’ opinion.

Key stakeholders in healthcare include patients, providers, advocacy groups, payers, research participants, and policy makers among other stakeholders. However, the extent of stakeholder involvement depends on the reason behind the policy development. In the formulation of alternative policies, stakeholder objectives are structured and incorporated. However, their controversial social decisions are also considered (Lemke & Harris-Wai, 2015). One disadvantage of creating alternative policies using stakeholder decisions is that multiple negotiations may arise. This is because stakeholders will oppose or support decisions depending on the structure of their community. Therefore, the engagement methods and results are likely to vary. Recommendations to increase stakeholder engagement in alternative policies include informing, consulting and collaborating. Further, organizations can empower and collaborate with stakeholders in formulating effective alternative policies.

References

Lemke, A. A., & Harris-Wai, J. N. (2015). Stakeholder engagement in policy development: challenges and opportunities for human genomics. Genetic Medicine, 17(12), 949–957. https://www.doi.org/10.1038/gim.2015.8

Study.com. (2021). Costs & Benefits of Alternative Public Policies. https://study.com/academy/lesson/costs-benefits-of-alternative-public-policies.html

The Florida Senate. (2020). CS/CS/HB 607: Direct Care Workers. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2020/607

The Florida Senate. (2021). HB 607: Antiretroviral Drugs. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/607