POLICY

POLICY may not be an exciting word (unless you are a policy wonk). A POLICY is a deliberate system of principles to guide decisions. A POLICY is a statement of intent, and is implemented as a procedure or protocol.

But for us to provide the most useful information to health care professionals at the point of care we need to continue to establish and improve our POLICIES to guide our deliberate system. To make clear for others the complicated array of evidence with all the intricacies of how reliable or unreliable the evidence can be, the guidance from many professionals crossing disciplines and geographic borders with all the intricacies of how well the judgments, rational thinking, clinical expertise, patient values and conflicts of interest are incorporated for justifying that guidance, and the many overlapping considerations of context, multi-morbidity, clarity and potential ambiguity of language – to make this clear for others we need to have POLICY to guide how we do it.  And with hundreds of people working on this POLICY development can be a substantial undertaking to get it right, get it done efficiently, and include everyone for transparency and opportunity to contribute.

As we just completed a POLICY transforming one of our more complicated and confusing areas into simple, actionable concepts that will improve our clarity, accuracy and precision of language I take a moment to reflect and share my substantial APPRECIATION for the team in pulling this together. Many contributed in multiple ways but I’d like to especially thank and acknowledge Judy for conceptualizing and implementing a series of surveys to help capture your collective input and make POLICY refinement smooth and well targeted.

This effort provided substantial ALIGNMENT of our THREE R’s (What is REQUIRED for policy development? How can we do it efficiently for a good RETURN on the effort expended? Do we get the REWARD of supporting engagement and contribution across the team?) with the insights and creativity of our team and an approach that could identify and question many of the ASSUMPTIONS leading to our current ways of thinking. Recognizing this also provides a nice GROWTH opportunity as we consider how to improve our process for tackling POLICY of similar complexity in the future.

POLICY should be dynamic and stable. Here are some of the most relevant quotes I could find:

• For a dynamic view: The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not. – Niccolo Machiavelli
• For a stable view: Honesty is the best policy. – Ben Franklin
• For a criticism of it: The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy. – Robert E. Lee