NR 506 Week 2 Discussion, Policy-Priority Selection

NR 506 Week 2 Discussion, Policy-Priority Selection Identify your selected healthcare concern in your city or state that needs your advocacy with an elected official. What is the impetus and rationale for your selection? What is your solution to this concern? Describe the model of policymaking that you feel would be best applied to your policy concern and the rationale for selecting this model. The selected healthcare concern in my city that I choose to address: childhood obesity. Currently according to ‘The State of Obesity,’ Texas ranks 15th in the nation for children from ages 10-17 years old for obesity (2018). Currently, in the little rural community, I reside the local park is in bad shape and has not been updated in many years. With the amount of youth in our area that wants to use the park or parents that are concerned about the park, it would be a good outlet for getting our local children active. In the area I am in sports such as baseball, softball, football, and basketball are popular. Yet, this is another reason to update the local park to ensure that our children have a safe place to play and burn energy to help address childhood obesity. The current school of thought for childhood obesity has linked a sedentary lifestyle, demographics, diet, and genetics as serious concerns (Bhadoria et al., 2015). In my research, I found that there are many grants that can be applied to provide relief for the city budget, should they decide to choose to contribute to fighting against childhood obesity. Ideally, a small local community center that offers a gym without basic workout equipment would be better. However, considering in the recent local newspaper, the EMS services report that our small town is not paying the annual fees. The idea of a local community center with a focus on health and providing children an outlet for energy would just not be feasible. The policy model that I believe would best benefit my concern, Kingdon’s Policy Streams Model. This model consists of 3 streams: problem, policy and political stream (Mason, Gardner, Outlaw & O'Grady, 2016). My rationale for choosing this model: simplicity. The problem stream: childhood obesity; policy stream: my goal would be to combat childhood obesity at the local level. The interest groups that could be encouraged to get behind this would be parents, educators, as well as local healthcare providers. Lastly, the political stream could consist of local news media, the county health department as well as introducing grants that are created to drive the cost down and to ensure that our goals for contributing to the fight for childhood obesity. References: Bhadoria, A., Sahoo, K., Sahoo, B., Choudhury, A., Sufi, N., & Kumar, R. (2015). Childhood obesity: Causes and consequences. Journal Of Family Medicine And Primary Care, 4(2), 187. doi: 10.4103/. Mason, D., Gardner, D., Outlaw, F., & O'Grady, E. (2016). Policy & politics in nursing and health care (7th ed.). St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier. State Briefs. (2019). Retrieved from