What if someone is hurt while receiving a therapy in your setting? Who's responsible? Did the practitioner make a mistake? If you don't have policy and procedure for that therapy, how would you know? In this lesson, we will discuss the difference between a policy and a procedure, and discuss the key components of an effective policy. Each day-to-day task conducted by medical professionals follows a policy or procedure which incorporates the relevant legal, ethical, and organizational requirements. Thus one purpose is risk management. Ensuring that the providers are compliant with regulations, ethical considerations, accreditation rules, and other organizational requirements. They standardize practice in two ways. First, they reduce practice variations that result from different educational backgrounds and practice philosophies. Second, they standardized practices across multiple entities within a single health system. So patients experienced a similar level in quality of care regardless of where they go. Policies and procedures also reduce human error. Specifically, they provide guidance by serving as a resource and they reduce reliance on memory which when overtaxed is a major source of human errors and oversights. Standardized policies and procedures in health care have been shown to provide better patient care, better outcomes, including lower mortality rates and improved deficiency. As health care providers integrate more integrative therapies into existing services, they must adopt policies and procedures to establish each new area of care provided. This includes breaking ground in unexplored areas of research that wouldn't otherwise be researched. Policies and procedures help create accountability, a culture of consistency, quality collaboration, trust and sustainability around integrative therapies. Part of this is generating guidelines for patient care, which helps standardize practice when clinicians have different practice philosophies. Finally, policies and procedures identify measurable results, so effectiveness can be tracked. A policy is a general plan of action for communicating and guiding desired outcome of the organization. Policies direct health care workers to take action consistent with legal, ethical, and organizational requirements. Policies state what has to be achieved and why, and answers major organizational issues. Policies help employees understand their roles and responsibilities within the organization. Good policies are broad, current, comprehensive, inviolate written to specify responsibility for action and use frequently. A good policy will not lock you into rigid procedures or decision-making rather, it will provide guidance for handling a wide range of organizational and programmatic issues, and will establish a framework for both management and staff decision making. An example is an employee hand hygiene policy which might say all members of the healthcare team will comply with current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Hand Hygiene Guidelines. There are key elements that should be contained in a policy. See the reading elements of a policy for details about each of these. A procedure outlines a sequence of desired action oriented steps for specific people for completing a given activity. Procedures are typically embedded in policy documents, and are more of a micro level application. It is not unusual for procedures to change often as dictated by any number of factors such as staffing, equipment, space, and technology. Procedures allow health care workers to do their day-to-day operations without managers having to micromanage every task. One example is employee hand hygiene where the procedure outlines when and how to wash hands. It also outlines how long fingernails should be. The example provided this week is a portion of the policy for integrative nursing. It is a policy that supports a procedure.