Legislative: Searching for Health Policy Information on the Internet: An Essential Advocacy Skill

Abstract

Nurses and Health Policy 2009-2010 healthcare reform agenda of President Obama and the 111th Congress clearly illustrates the importance of nurses' efforts to influence health policy. Individual nurses and professional organizations across the country who took part in town hall meetings, wrote letters to the editor, and voiced their opinions to elected officials helped generate momentum leading to the passage of H.R.3962, The Affordable Health Care for America Act (American Nurses Association, 2009). congressional debates that followed and resulted in passage of the historic health care reform bill, H. R. 3590, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also demonstrate that sustained effort is essential to achieve health policy change (American Nurses Association. 2010). Health policy advocacy requires participation in political arenas; many nurses may not feel prepared to navigate these arenas effectively (Abood, 2007). Taking political action on behalf of the public, as well as advocating for the nursing profession, begins with staying informed and networking to shape reform efforts. Therefore, the goal of this column is to help nurses search for and evaluate health policy information on the Internet. Useful health policy websites are provided. Searching for Health Policy Information Information is a critical resource for political involvement. Although the Internet provides nurses access to excellent resources to keep abreast of leading health policy issues, busy professionals need help dealing with today's Internet information overload. Sorting through millions of electronic documents to find relevant information can be daunting and time consuming. Furthermore, nurses need quick and easy access to high quality information, such as systematic reviews of health policy research, to guide the development of solutions for health -related problems (Fox, 2005; Lavis, Posada, Haines, & Osei, 2004). Useful guidelines for searching peerreviewed, and professional literature databases, such as PubMed and CINAHL (The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), have been published by Klem and Northcutt f2008) and also Morrisey and DeBourgh (2001). practical strategies and tips we offer in this column for searching Internet sites for health policy information complement the scholarly literature. A successful health policy Internet search begins with thorough planning. first and most important step for obtaining highly relevant search results is formulating a clear and concise health policy issue statement that succinctly describes and quantifies the problem to be addressed (Bardach, 2000). next step is to identify the target authence for the advocacy efforts. This step will help to determine how complex and detailed the information that you gather will need to be fAndrews. Burr. & Ja netos. 2004). Consider, for example, whether the goal is to inform the public about healthcare reform proposals generally orto work with congressional experts to obtain Medicare reimbursement for transitional care. final step is to identify key words and phrases to look for information using a search engine. Brainstorming the concepts that are most relevant to the policy topic is an effective way to generate key words. Search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search, are the most common tools to find information on the Internet. Search engines are actually large databases of web documents created by automated search programs fBarker, 2003). Working at the interface between the searcher and the Internet, the search engine locates information by matching key words entered into the search box to websites and documents in the databases. Then, the engine weighs and ranks the web pages according to relevance. Search engines differ in size, speed, coverage of the Internet, search options, and the schemes used for ranking, so each will return slightly different search results CHanes-Ramos. …