PROJECT PROBLEM STATEMENT (An Older Workforce Impact on Healthcare)
Order Description
Topic:An Older Workforce Impact on Healthcare
This is the first step in developing your policy brief and will be useful when you work on Step ONE in Bardach. So, what is a problem statement? It is a sentence or two that very broadly tells your reader the issue that you want them to be concerned about and the reason that they should care. The first part of the statement gives the reader information. The second part answers the question, “so what?”
Consider the following example taken from the CDC:
Starting in 1989, Congress designated a specific portion of each state’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) budget allocation to be used for the promotion and support of breastfeeding among WIC participants. More than five years after the government started supporting promotional efforts, breastfeeding rates among WIC participants were considerably lower than for women of higher socioeconomic levels. In 1995, 59.7 percent of infants in the U.S. were breastfed at birth while only 46.6 percent of infants in WIC programs were. At six months postpartum, the rates were 21.6 percent nationally and only 12.7 percent for WIC-enrolled infants.
In September 1995, Best Start Social Marketing, a non-profit social marketing organization based in Tampa, Florida, was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers WIC, to develop a comprehensive, national breastfeeding promotional campaign through WIC.
To develop a problem statement, a community-led coalition looked at available local data and found that:
Teen pregnancy and rates of sexually transmitted infection (STI) were high among youth ages 15-19, especially in 15 Sacramento area zip codes.
The 1995 California Youth Risk Behavior Survey (conducted by the California Department of Education) estimated that 45% of high school students were sexually active.
AIDS diagnoses among the city’s young adults suggested that infection indeed was occurring during teen years.
Problem statement: Youth ages 14-18 residing in 15 zip codes in the Sacramento area are at unacceptably high risk of HIV infection.
NOTE — you are shooting to submit just the short statement as seen in the example in bold above. To come up with the statement you will begin research into your topic.
