Assignment:
Describe the landscape in which the problem exists, including the key stakeholders in the issue and the political climate.
Stakeholders in a health services problem include:
• Consumers (patients and their families)
• Clinicians (individuals in a variety of disciplines, practice groups, and hospitals)
• Payers (insurers)
• Businesses (e.g., pharmaceutical or medical device manufacturers)
• Policymakers (e.g., medical organizations and government)
• Advocacy and education groups (e.g., patient advocacy groups, societies devoted to a specific health issue, such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society or the March of Dimes).
• Others
In an environmental problem, the same general categories of stakeholders are represented, although the members of the consumer and other groups are specific to the environmental problem.
The political climate can be loosely defined as the combination of past and present public stances, often conflicting, of the key stakeholder groups as well as the prior attempts to solve the problem.
When planning to begin a program or to conduct an intervention to address a public problem, a certain intervention may be effective from a technical standpoint but unpopular with stakeholders. If stakeholders' needs and concerns are not addressed, the program will fail on various levels.
For this assignment:
• Review the following example of stakeholder involvement in addressing an environmental concern-the Amchitka Island site:
A military airbase was established on this Alaskan island during World War II and underground nuclear bomb testing was conducted during 1965-1971 (Giblin, Stahl, & Bechtel, 2002). These events and subsequent stakeholder participation are summarized by Rutgers University faculty members in the abstracts of several journal articles.
• Using the South University Online Library, review the following two abstracts:
o Burger, J., Gochfeld, M., & Pletnikoff, K. (2009). Collaboration
versus communication: The Department of Energy's
Amchitka Island and the Aleut Community. Environmental
Research, 109(4), 503-510.
o Burger, J., & Gochfeld, M. (2009). Changes in Aleut concerns
following the stakeholder-driven Amchitka independent
science assessment. Risk Analysis, 29(8), 1156-1169.
One of the stakeholder involvement activities was participation in sampling of wildlife and other biota at the site during an independent external scientific assessment of the site by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) (access photos at https://www.cresp.org/amchitka_photos/amchitka_phase2/apia/index.html).
An advocacy group involved in the controversy was GreenPeace. GreenPeace was founded in 1971 during a voyage to protest nuclear weapons testing on Amchitka (accessible at https://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/
about/history/amchitka-hunter/).
• Write a 3- to 5-page landscape paper in a Microsoft Word document addressing the following:
o State the 2- to 3-sentence problem statement that you submitted.
o Identify and describe key stakeholders and the factors that must be considered when analyzing your project's environmental problem. Include the public, business, government, and scientific stakeholders and, if applicable, stakeholder groups of workers and other nations (landscape). Determine if other stakeholder groups should be included and describe them.
o Justify briefly why each of your listed groups may be considered stakeholders. The tone of this section should be neutral, even if you disagree with a stakeholder group's position.
o Summarize the political landscape of your environmental problem, including public stances of key stakeholder groups, conflicts between stakeholder groups, and past attempts to resolve the environmental problem.
o Provide and justify your conclusions about how stakeholder groups and political issues should guide the development of solutions to your problem.