Tuesday, April 10th

We discussed some of the ways that policies get implemented. First a problem needs to be identified so an agenda can be created. Once you have an issue, you can start brainstorming different alternatives. Once an agreed upon alternative is decided a new policy can start to be adopted. This happens through new policy implementation. After a while the policy can be evaluated to determine how affective an alternative it was. Since this cyclical, ultimately the policy can't be terminated. We than discussed how this applied to national nutrition. We learned when the government discovers a an issue (I.e. pregnant woman not receiving adequate nutrition) they have to create a policy (WIC). We also discussed some of the ways in which the government collects this type of data. One of the biggest is through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.