The role of public health professionals in policy and advocacy is vital to the health
industry. Becoming agents of change is why many choose the public health profession and
the goal of public health in general. As a local health professional, I act as an agent of
change by executing projects within the local healthcare system that directly affect the
community. As a Project Manager, I have been able to participate in projects such as
implementing new service lines, enhancing primary care access through scheduling
template optimization, improving breast diagnostics for breast cancer patients within the
community, and much more. Each of these projects focuses on a public health issue in need
of change or improvement. While this a fulfilling and rewarding role, acting as a change
agent is not always easy. There are always internal, external, and inherit leadership
challenges for those acting as change agents (Community Tool Box , 2020). For me, some of
the internal challenges have been implementing change in areas where the leader of that
area is resistant to the change or apprehensive. Change is not always easy and as the
Project Manager, it’s part of my role to ensure at the beginning of each project that each
stakeholder understands the objective. This is where the “buy-in” happens. It’s an
important part of the project because it sets the tone for the remainder of the project and
how team members relate to one another. External challenges can be relying on licensing,
inspections, or other needs and building that appropriately within the project plan.
Overcoming these challenges is an important part of being a change agent in public health.
References
Community Tool Box . (2020). Section 6. Recognizing the Challenges of Leadership.
Responses to post
According to the referred post, it shows the critical uses of respective systems approaches and
different perceptions of how they work in different setups. Systems thinking approaches dwell on
the understanding of how different things influence one another. A real-world example of a
system thinking approach would mean that a company would focus on a particular sector rather
than the whole part because activities are interrelated in this approach. HSBC Bank uses system
thinkers in its global operations such as Lain Stewart, who evaluate immediate priorities. This
increases the functionality of the bank’s operation through solving of the bank’s main problems.
(Douglas, 2013) A company that focuses on strategic planning approaches is aware of its vision
as well as a setup plan to make the vision true. This venture beat article shows how Evernote, a
company that creates and develops features is having a financial breakdown. Through the
appointment of a new CEO, Evernote creates a new strategic plan to ensure service provision is
of quality to enhance competitively and long term success. (Taylor, 2020).These systems are not
interchangeable whatsoever. System thinking approaches cannot perform the work that the
strategic planning approaches are enforced. However, these approaches go in hand in hand, to
mean they are interrelated. I completely disagree with the fact that these approaches can be
interchanged but in the same case, I agree that developing a strategy without understanding the
knowledge of the system is impossible while also forming systems without a planned strategy.
(Zhu, 2014).
References
Taylor, A. (n.d.). Why Do the Best Companies in the World Use Strategic Planning?
Systems Thinking Examples | Facilitating Business Transformation | Systems Thinking. (n.d.).
Zhu, P. Z. (2014, June 2). System Thinking vs. Strategic Thinking.