Policy Writing: It’s What You Say
Writing policies can be confusing; focus on what you say.
When writing your company’s policies and procedures, it is helpful to understand what to do. Most organizations create documents such as these for manuals. Proposals. Program statements. Accreditation. They serve a purpose. They tell your organization’s staff, the community, your stakeholders, and others what you do.
But policies are not the same as procedures. And it’s easy to get them mixed up. A policy tells people what you do. A procedure tells people how you do it. More on this next week.
Back to policies. Many organizations, when asked to write a policy, don’t know what to put into them. The first step is simple. Write the word, “Policy” at the top of the page. Then everything under that title follows. Sounds easy, but many organizations don’t do this.
Then what is a policy? It tells your audience what you do. What you want to do. And many different types of ideas can come into play.
It can be like a memo. Where you want employees to follow a guideline. Except a policy is more permanent. It can be a purpose. A philosophy. A vision. As long as it tells your readers what you do, now or in the future.
Let’s take an example.
Suppose you’re a behavioral health organization. And you as a leader notice a lot of youths are on psychotropic medications. It makes you wonder why this might be happening. You’re concerned because you know that youths suffering from trauma may appear to need meds. But they need trauma-based treatment by themselves or in conjunction with meds. And their trauma symptoms may be overlooked. You talk to your staff and the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist now does a cursory discussion about trauma with clients but is not sufficient enough.
Your clinical team recommends that the organization start using more detailed evaluations for trauma with youths. Such as standardized measures and a trauma-based evaluation process which gathers information from youths about their experiences and how it’s impacted them. They have all the steps they want the staff to use when youths are first in the program or need evaluations for psychiatry.
That’s good for the procedures. But you want everyone to know why this is so important. You want to put a statement and a rationale for evaluating youths for trauma before meds. This is your policy.
Here’s a suggestion:
Policy:
The ABC Organization recognizes that our youths and their families at times have experienced trauma. This can be in form of abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, traumatic events, etc. These youths have difficulties with their emotions, physical symptoms, and/or behaviors. As a result, their conditions may be more complex. It is the policy of ABC Organization that, before any youth being prescribed psychotropic medications, they receive a thorough trauma evaluation. This will consist of the XYZ Scale for PTSD and our own Trauma Evaluation form.
Just like that. Nothing too complicated. Although it can be as long as an agency wants. But this removes the “how” from the equation and leaves that for the Procedures.
Praxes helps agencies develop policies and procedures for regulatory compliance and policy manuals.
Here is a list of our services.
For more information, please contact us.
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