Agency Policy Research Articles

Structural Barriers to High-Quality Home Healthcare Nursing: What Home Health Nurses Want Medicare Policy Makers and Agency Administrators to Know

Previous research indicates home health nurses (HHNs) worry that current home health care trends are threatening their ability to provide high-quality nursing care. High-quality nursing requires patient-centered and culture-sensitive care. These 2 attributes are indicators of high-quality nursing care. In this qualitative study, 20 HHNs were interviewed to discover their insights into 2 research questions: What barriers affect HHNs’ ability to provide patient-centered, culture-sensitive, high-quality nursing care and how do these barriers affect HHNs and patients? Participants were professional HHNs who provided skilled intermittent care to diverse patient populations in their homes. Participants believed that a lack of time, high productivity requirements, pay-per-visit compensation, documentation burden, EMR systems, and the “industrialization” of HHNs’ practice create structural barriers to high-quality home health nursing. Medicare was perceived as contributing to the barriers with burdensome documentation requirements and regulations that impeded holistic patient-centered care. Nurse participants indicated that the effects of these barriers were nurse stress, burnout, moral distress, and intent to leave; lower patient outcomes and satisfaction; and healthcare disparities. Additional research about the structural barriers were reviewed and found to support the nurses’ perceptions of barriers to high-quality nursing care. In a value-based purchasing system, agencies need to support high-quality nursing care by tackling the barriers to its practice. To address the barriers comprehensively, agencies can institute policies that mirror the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Pathway to Excellence®. Medicare policy makers should examine how present policies adversely affect high-quality nursing care.

Every state for itself: A comparison of states’ visitation guidelines with research studies

Contact between children in care and their families and affiliates is an important component of child welfare practice. Depending on how visitation is handled and the readiness of the parties to interact, contact can result in positive or negative effects. However, scholars find that workers who supervise and arrange visitation often lack the requisite skills and knowledge to conduct visits in the most beneficial ways. As agency policies, particularly when they are research-informed, influence practice, this study analyzes the guidelines on visitation collected from the state child welfare agencies in the United States of America (USA) and compares them with research findings and researchers’ recommendations for best practices. The materials analyzed were collected from 43 states and included pages from policy manuals or administrative standards, tip sheets for case workers, brochures developed for families, stand-alone guidelines, and documentation forms. The guidelines vary widely in terms of the amount and specificity of information they contain, but their overall coverage of topics is sparse and not always in line with research findings. A need exists to update and expand the guidelines, which could then function as one tool to improve practice.

Movements' Dynamics and Government Responsiveness to Violence Against Women: A Study Set Against Political and Social Change in Spain and Italy.

Actions to counter violence against women are a fully fledged policy field with significant differences across countries. Through a comparative analysis of Spain and Italy, this article maps the interplay between women's movements and national governments in launching violence against women (VAW) policies. In Spain, policy formation was the outcome of dual feminist-socialist activism, leading to dialogue between movements and the government. In Italy, movements opposed the government from the outside. In both countries, the critical factor inciting responsiveness on VAW was not one single variable but a combination of political opportunity, movement identity, dedicated women's policy agencies, and the soft power of international institutions.

Attitudes Toward Park and Recreation Agency Actions in Support of People Experiencing Homelessness

Park and recreation providers are increasingly called upon to interface with and serve an unhoused user population. However, park and recreation agency policies are often inconsistent with increasingly progressive societal attitudes toward the issue of homelessness and people experiencing homelessness. Despite the growing salience of this issue, there is a relative lack of information regarding attitudes toward agency actions intended to support people experiencing homelessness. In this note, we use panel survey data to provide descriptive information and group comparisons via independent samples t-tests that we believe will prove useful for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in this context. Our results indicate that while respondents are largely supportive of this type of agency action, park users, younger people, and those who are more affluent and economically conservative are more supportive of actions intended to support people experiencing homelessness.

Ideology, knowledge, and the assessment of science policy agencies

Abstract In the USA, politics often dominates the conversation surrounding science and related technologies. We also live in times of high political polarization, leading to political debate over scientific discoveries and subsequent policy implications. Given these dynamics, there is much to be learned about the politicization of science, individuals’ policy views, and the public’s relationship with the communication and interpretation of scientific findings. Agencies are often responsible for facilitating scientific research and framing its policy relevance for decision makers and the public. This paper uses data from a large national public opinion survey to investigate citizen attitudes about government science agencies. We theorize that disparities between objective and self-assessed scientific knowledge coupled with ideological cues help frame citizen evaluations of agencies. We find that individuals’ political ideologies and disparities between knowledge types shape citizen assessments of energy-related scientific agencies. These findings have important implications for our understanding of public acceptance of the work of government science agencies.

Agency in the Ecology of Language Policy and Planning: A systematic literature review

Post-modern research has shifted attention in language policy and planning from central decision-making to lower-scale agency. However, there is a paucity of studies assessing the nature and quality of papers about agency in language policy and planning ecology. Considering Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis, this study examines how language policy scholars approached the agentive roles of local arbiters. All research papers published about agency in language policy and planning across three databases in the last five years were considered for this review. The results indicate that the conceptualization, design, and execution of agency-oriented research are not yet woven into a fully-fledged theoretical fabric.

Manage and make productive: The New Zealand National Party’s social investment policy

New Zealand National Party’s 2022–2023 policy of Social Investment, which if adopted, will legitimise the management of young unemployed in the name of correcting and helping them. Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) concept of ‘rational bureaucratic culture’ is used to examine the aims to bring the ‘abnormal’ citizen into the tax-paying fold. The policy will ‘manage and make productive’ young welfare recipients to avoid them ‘bludging’ and encourage them into ‘productive work’, no matter how menial. Using philanthropic monies alongside funding through Vote : Social Development is a new development which removes the state’s sole financing of its safety-net responsibility. It will see a new interpretation of Principal: Agency policy.

The control and agency dialectic of guest worker programmes: evidence from Chinese construction workers in Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP)

ABSTRACT Guest worker programs entail an intrinsic tension between control over workers’ mobility and workers’ agency. By drawing on the qualitative data from Chinese construction workers in Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), I illuminate the dialectical nature of the tension between control and agency. My findings suggest that labor recruiters and employers implement labor control, but their practices have the opposite effect of pressing workers to abscond or to do irregular jobs. Staying in the program is not an outcome of effective control, but a response to circumstances wherein revisions to Japan’s immigration policy bring rewards while China’s surveillance policies incur potential punishments. The control-agency dialectic suggests that the regulative focus should be shifted from workers to employers and recruiters. Incorporating approaches of spatiotemporality and relationality, I analyze how workers sustain relations with various actors through three interconnected temporal stages, and how the relational dynamics shape workers’ varied mobility choices. Two features of the construction industry shape workers’ circumstances and occasionally facilitate their mobility: the stratification of the labor force according to legal status and the subcontract system. The paper thus highlights the need to contextualise labor agency in changing state policies, relations with co-ethnics, and industry-specific features.

Conditional early approval for new drug applications in Japan: Current and emerging issues.

Conditional early approval for new drug applications in Japan: Current and emerging issues.

Lethal Force Usage by Law Enforcement Officers Against Hispanics, 2011-2020.

Most research on lethal force by law enforcement officers (LEOs) has focused on firearm deaths by LEOs among certain racial groups (e.g., African Americans). Specifically, not much is known about LEOs-induced lethal injuries among Hispanics. The purpose of this study was to characterize LEOs induced fatal injuries, the methods used, among various demographic groups of Hispanics, and the years of potential life lost before the age of 80 years due to lethal force by LEOs. Data from the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) were analyzed for the years 2011-2020. LEOs killed 1,158 Hispanics; most were males (96.2%) with the majority being shot (89.9%). Two-thirds (66.9%) of those killed were Hispanics 20-39 years of age and from the Western U.S. These Hispanic deaths resulted in 53,320 YPLLs. Males and those ages 20-39 years lost the most YPLLs. The rate of fatal encounters with LEOs for Hispanics grew by 44.4% over the decade, with the highest rate in 2020. Mitigation of unnecessary Hispanic deaths by LEOs needs to include changes in law enforcement agency policies, hiring practices for LEOs, improved data collection for LEOs use of lethal force, improved mental healthcare and training for LEOs, use of less lethal strategies for citizen control by law enforcement, deference education for all young adults, and long-term changes in social forces that have created and maintained disenfranchised communities of color.

청소년의 온오프라인 도박행위 영향요인 비교 연구

Because adolescents’ gambling behavior causes various social problems over personal dimension problems, effective methods on not just themselves but home, school, and governmental levels(such as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Gender Equality & Family, Ministry of Health and Welfare, and National Police Agency) are urgently requested. Thus, this study analyzed empirically the reason for friends which is one of the quoted reasons for adolescents participating in gambling through the differential association theory suggested by Edwin H. Sutherland. In this study, to compare factors that affect adolescents' online and offline gambling, the researcher conducted an empirical analysis by using secondary data from the “2020’ adolescent gambling problem Survey” conducted by the Korea Center on Gambling Problems, and the subject of this survey was limited to middle and high school student who resides in Korea. As a result, it is suggested that differential association factors except friendship have significant effects on online and offline gambling behavior. Segregating friend’s effect on the type of adolescents’ gambling behavior, gambling with friends is suggested high level on offline gambling behavior, in contrast, on online gambling behavior, gambling with friends is suggested low level. Also, it is suggested that more introducing gambling by friends causes more addicting gambling on online and offline gambling behavior. To restrain adolescents' gambling, the gambling service provider should receive criminal punishment, and related organizations such as National Policy Agency regulate illegal gambling websites through cooperation with domestic and foreign organizations. Additionally, make adolescents control themselves for not to engage in gambling through active education and campaigns, and simultaneously systemic rehabilitation support system should be established for gambling addicted adolescents.

Theorizing illiberal state feminism: Institutional dilemmas and political parallelism in China's gender governance

Institutionally speaking, state feminism is manifested by a strong women's policy agency (WPA) that facilitates bargaining between women's movements and state bureaucracies. It remains underexplored, however, when state feminism thrives or deteriorates under authoritarianism and what institutional factors account for this. Using China's contemporary gender politics as a case study, this article aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of illiberal state feminism theory and its internal workings. It contends that deep-rooted institutional dilemmas lie at the heart of an illiberal state feminism such as China's, which are expressed in four pairs of contradictions: 1) interest consolidation vs misrepresentation, 2) coalition-building vs repression 3) institutionalization vs bureaucratization, and 4) political integration vs parallelism. These internal contradictions lead to the inevitable segregation and marginalization of illiberal state feminism. This article contributes to the current scholarship on state feminism by dissecting the unintended institutional obstacles faced by a single dominant WPA sponsored by an illiberal state.

Social Policy and Religion in a Globalizing Era

Our paper critically analyses the well-known and old partnership between religious actors and social policy agencies undertaking interventions in the public sphere aimed at influencing redistributive measures (social welfare, distributive justice) and development. Starting from a typology of religious welfare and classic welfare regime the paper underlines the necessity of rising up further the "social mission of religion" in a globalized world increasingly exposed to social, economic and political turbulence, as a link between state and community.

Urban-rural divide and COVID-19: engaging teachers to assess and improve the Philippine basic education-learning continuity plan

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed poverty and exacerbated social inequality. Our role as academics is to illuminate these social issues to help policy makers address them adequately. Hence, we conducted this ethnographic study situated within the discourse urban-rural divide to assess the Philippine Basic Education-Learning Continuity Plan (BE-LCP), a COVID-19 education response, through the help of three teachers who, like us, the researchers, have been exposed to the rural and urban areas in Sindangan, Zamboanga del Norte. In our effort to promote social justice and equity in education, we have privileged the voices of those in the marginalized rural sector. We interviewed the teacher key actors, conducted autoethnography and participant observation, and studied secondary sources available. Data sources were triangulated, and data transcripts were analysed through thematic analysis, drawing on relevant theories and literature. Interrelated social factors instigated by the government’s biased past policies are (a) socioeconomic impact of COVID-19, (b) digital divide, (c) school location, and (d) parental education. While the pandemic affected urban and rural residents, the latter felt a severe impact. This study underscores the teacher agency in the BE-LCP policy: Teachers recommended monitoring learning outcomes, attending to low-performing learners, supporting home-based learning, and providing teaching resources.

School of social work in partnership with community: finding areas for potential collaboration in service delivery

ABSTRACT In seeking to bridge the micro-macro divide in social work education, we conceptualized, developed, and initiated an innovative university-community partnership-based pilot internship program over a two-year period with four social work student interns placed within the cross-section of local government, social service agencies and community. Our goal was to work within the tripartite context to identify gaps in service delivery in the communities and support local organizations in addressing the gaps. The social problems identified through the internship program revealed service gaps in the areas of substance abuse treatment, intimate partner violence, parenting support, poverty alleviation and services for clients of color and individuals presenting with juvenile delinquency issues. While lack of student preparedness, agency policies, cost and lack of a clear understanding of the internship structure and goals constituted some barriers, the first year of the pilot’s implementation provided a strong case for university-community engagement and resulted in the creation of a comprehensive program structure to guide the execution of this internship model in future.

ONDCP‐funded model law calls for less punitive approach to pregnant users

Model state legislation informed by a working group of experts with the support of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) emphasizes that maintaining a treatment‐focused approach to substance‐using pregnant women and meeting federal child welfare reporting requirements are not mutually exclusive goals. The model act lends the weight of the leading federal drug policy agency to an effort to counteract increasingly punitive actions in some states that have targeted pregnant women with substance use disorders (SUDs).

Social security agency of health (BPJS health) implementation on dentures patient in USA community health center (Puskesmas USA) bone regency 2022

Abstract: Implementation of Social Security Agency of Health (SCAH) /BPJS for Dentures Patients at the Usa Community Health Center in Bone Regency 2022. Tooth loss is a problem that can interfere with dental and oral health. This study aims to explore the implementation of social security agency policies for dentures patients at the Usa Community Health Center in 2022. This type of research is a qualitative study using a snowball sampling technique. The results of this study found that the informants had understood the services for installing dental prostheses that were borne by BPJS Health. As for the information, they do not understand the tariffs for dental prostheses or dentures, which are included in the service being covered by BPJS Health. BPJS Health provides a number of medical services for the community, one of which is dental and oral care, in this case dental prostheses or dentures. From the input and process results it was found that for the implementation of BPJS Health for dental prostheses there are still indicators that are not fully achieved, such as the rates of prostheses or dentures which are still misinterpreted by some patients.

A Concept of the Needs of The Ministry’s Internal Policy Agency for the Policy Response to the Formation of BRIN

The current Government policy that integrates all Research and Development Agencies in Ministries and Institutions demands that these agencies must be transformed. To be able to answer various strategic issues and anticipate demands that come from the internal and external environment is the basis for an organization to organize and evaluate internally. Proposed organizational arrangements in this case must have a clear basis and contain analysis of the various aspects needed. The purpose of this scientific work is to provide a concept for transforming a research and development Agency into an internal Policy Agency to avoid duplication of duties and functions in existing Research Agencies. This study uses the policy review type method which is focused on reviewing documents. The need for an Internal Policy Agency at the Ministries/Agencies level is currently very urgent because of the diverse and complex fields of work and to produce quality policies and can be measured by the Policy Quality Index. There are several suggestions for Ministries/Institutions that will form an Internal Policy Agency, among others, transformation must be based on evidence-based needs.

Conceptual Analysis of Public Policy Failures in Nigeria: Tract to Economic Underdevelopment

The study examined the conceptual issues of public policy failure in Nigeria and how it affects economic development. The main objective of the study is to conceptually analyses public policy failures in Nigeria as a tract to economic underdevelopment. Contents method was used in the analysis. This means that the study uses conceptual analysis and rational analysis in assessing the public policies failures in Nigeria. The study was based on the thesis of elite theory. The study reveals that public policies are not effective in Nigeria. The paper also reveals the consequences of public policies failure in Nigeria. The study analyzed the concept of public policy and economic underdevelopment. The study concludes that constant changes of government in Nigeria, high level of corruption among government officials of these public policies agencies among others affected the smooth operations of public policies in Nigeria. The study therefore recommends that there should be continuity in public policy implementation even where there is change in government as government is a continuum; and parochial and primordial interests should be avoided during policy formulation and implementation in the country. There should be capital punishment in the country constitution to address the issues of corruption in Nigeria.

The policy trajectory of green building development in China: A sequential and network analysis

AbstractPolicies play an extremely important role in promoting the development of green building (GB). Despite multiple policies have been issued to promote the GB development, the low market share of GB in China indicates that the policy system is unsatisfactory. However, few studies have concentrated on the policy trajectory of GB development. This study aims to fill this gap using network‐based analysis to explore the policy trajectory of GB development from the perspective of policy agency, objective, and instrument. 129 national GB development policies were collected, and the trajectory of policy agency, objective, and instrument were analyzed. The main results are as follows: (1) cross‐functional‐ and cross‐hierarchical‐level coordination between policy‐issuing agencies tends to increase. The cooperation among policy agencies represents a strong core‐periphery structure feature; (2) the policy objectives are related to multiple dimensions of GB development, and the focuses of GB development policy objectives are dynamically changed but show continuity to some degree; (3) the adoption of policy instruments is structurally unbalanced, and the mismatch between policy instruments and policy objective should be addressed urgently. Corresponding policy recommendations are provided from policy agencies, objectives and instruments. This research provides a novel perspective on policy analysis, which offers useful information on policy making for GB development.