National Rural Health Day Essay Contest - Center for Rural Health

As you consider a future in healthcare, it’s important to understand and recognize the impact healthcare providers, staff and patients can have on developing and changing systemic issues within the healthcare industry through advocacy. 

“Healthcare advocacy on a large-scale guides lawmakers and leaders who form healthcare policy. It supports a well-informed decision-making process regarding programs that affect:

• Patients
• Healthcare environments
• Healthcare providers

Broad healthcare advocacy encourages reforms that put the newest research into practice and cultivate better partnerships within the healthcare industry. It also strives to push for health policies that better account for factors such as poverty, as well as other social and economic circumstances that affect people’s health.

When successful, healthcare advocacy that influences public policy improves individual and community health, which reduces health disparities. Such advocacy guides health policy goals, gets priority legislation passed, and secures the funding needed to support he new policies enacted”. 

It is important for those working in the healthcare industry to look beyond patient’s medical needs and incorporate social factors of health into patient care, which forms the foundation of being an advocate. These factors may include education, income and employment, social support and housing, as well as early childhood experiences.

Service providers, whether they are caseworkers, public health educators or clinicians, know firsthand the roadblocks to delivering healthcare services.They are in a strategic position to identify problems,to understand the ways that will work to solve the problems, and to engage their clients and constituents in the process.

Advocacy can be done in many ways, including: seeking changes in government agency policy or practice, working with private businesses or health care institutions, changing laws, introducing ballot initiatives, taking direct group action, and, when necessary, litigation. Often, one or more of these strategies is used to bring about better health or to protect what is now working effectively. The same four steps to make change happen are used in every place where health policy decisions are made.

There are four primary steps to getting started in healthcare advocacy:
1. Get the facts
2. Organize support
3. Define the problem and make your plan
4. Communicate a clear and compelling story of what is wrong and what should be done

Public health advocacy is important because it helps to close health disparity gaps. It can significantly impact the health of underserved populations, help improve the health outcomes of those with disadvantaged backgrounds and can improve the overall health of individuals in communities as well as regions.

The American Public Health Association has an excellent one-page source that discusses the power of advocacy. View here

Essay Question: If you could advocate for one change in the healthcare industry, what would it be and why? (Research the facts, define the issue, communicate a clear and compelling story of what should be done and why.)

*Please note, the registration process and essay submission is designed to take place all at once. Applicants will be unable to save and retrieve information if they are interrupted or unable to complete their registration and essay submission during one login session. Applicants are encouraged to write and save their essay separately in a Word document and then upload their work once they are ready to complete the registration and essay submission process*