TOWARD A BASIS FOR POLICY-MAKING IN LONG-TERM NURSING CARE: IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING EDUCATION (KENNETH BENNE).
Contributors: Temple University.
Published: 1994
Number of pages: 151
Subjects: Education, Higher.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Health Sciences, Education.
Description: The purpose of this study was to examine the propositions of power and authority as presented by Kenneth Benne toward developing a basis for policy-making in long-term nursing care. The aim was to derive implications for nursing education.

Demographics describing cost projections of long-term care by the growing elderly population were presented. Examination of increasingly expensive long-term care policy through access, equity, cost, and quality revealed the fragmented character of health care policy. It was determined that health policy, a subset of social policy, concerned with the general welfare of society, has been inconsistent as effected by legislation.

It was proposed that nursing, a subset of health policy, could be informed by Benne's propositions on power and authority as a basis for policy-making in long-term nursing care of the elderly. Benne's proposal, a triadic authority relation comprised of bearer, subject, and field, warranted examination for its applicability in describing the authority relation in nursing education, a special case of schooling. As Benne described three instances of authority, the members of the triad did not emerge as distinct entities, blurring the relationship among them. If Benne's proposals are to be applicable as a decision-making apparatus, they require further study toward describing the distinctiveness of field, bearer, and subject in an authority relation.

It was argued that reliance on political and economic bases for decision-making in long-term care has focused on access, equity, and cost, deterring from constraining a field of authority. If health care, and by implication nursing care, is to be constrained, it must be characterized from a basis of life, person, and death, the central features of quality. Decision-making for long-term care requires characterization that differentiates that field from all others within the constraint of quality of care. If nursing education informs nursing care, then nursing education must engage the challenge of characterizing the field of long-term nursing care. Nurses, then, as bearers of authority, can inform policy-making based on accurate, consistent, and appropriate description of long-term nursing care of the elderly.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2295.

Thesis (ED.D.)--TEMPLE UNIVERSITY, 1994.

School code: 0225.