NURS 6226 Week 4 Legislative Analysis Example

Legislative Analysis: How a Committee Substitute Rewrote the Workplace Violence Bill

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 6226: Introduction to Healthcare Policy

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Legislative Analysis: How a Committee Substitute Rewrote the Workplace Violence Bill

Bill History

The composite state's workplace violence bill moved through the house in six recorded actions: introduction and first reading; referral to the house health committee; a stakeholder meeting called by the committee chair and attended by the nurses association, hospital association, public defenders, disability advocates and the health department; adoption of a committee substitute replacing the introduced text; release of a fiscal note on the substitute; and a committee vote to report the substitute favorably to the floor. The substitute, not the introduced bill, is what the house debated and passed. Committee stages are where most legislative text is shaped in practice, because the committee's version becomes the basis for everything that follows (Longest, 2016).

Introduced Versus Substitute

Appendix A sets the two versions side by side. The central changes are three. The criminal penalty section, which would have made such assaults felonies, was struck entirely. In its place, the substitute requires every hospital to adopt a written workplace violence prevention plan developed by a committee on which direct-care staff hold at least half the seats; to log every incident of workplace violence; to train workers annually; and to report incident totals and plan updates to the health department each year. The plan elements track the federal government's voluntary guidelines, which build a program around leadership commitment with staff involvement, analysis of the worksite, controls for identified hazards, training, and records (Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA], 2016).

The substitute is the product of a negotiation. The felony section was the price of support from disability advocates and public defenders, and the prevention mandate was what the nurses association and health care workers' union sought in exchange. The hospital association accepted the mandate after winning a clause allowing small and rural hospitals to share a single prevention committee.

Who Wrote It

The substitute was drafted by committee counsel working with the legislature's nonpartisan drafting office, from a negotiated draft that emerged from the chair's stakeholder meeting. Legislators rarely write bill text themselves; staff and drafting offices translate agreements into statutory language, and those who are at the table when that happens have unusual influence over the result (Mason et al., 2016). Nurses were at that table through their association.

What Was Left to Rulemaking

The substitute delegates one important choice to the health department: the definition of a workplace violence incident. Whether an incident includes verbal threats, or only physical contact, will determine how much violence hospitals must log and report. Delegation made agreement easier in committee, but it moves a significant decision into rulemaking, where the same stakeholders will have to engage again during the public comment period.

Fiscal Note

The fiscal note, prepared by the legislature's fiscal staff in the role the Congressional Budget Office plays for federal bills, estimated modest costs to the health department for reviewing plans and compiling annual reports, and stated that hospital compliance costs would fall on hospitals rather than the state. It did not estimate those hospital costs, which the hospital association has said it will raise before the senate committee.

Appendix A: Version Comparison

Table 1

Introduced Bill and Committee Substitute Compared

References

Longest, B. B., Jr. (2016). Health policymaking in the United States (6th ed.). Health Administration Press.

Mason, D. J., Gardner, D. B., Outlaw, F. H., & O'Grady, E. T. (Eds.). (2016). Policy & politics in nursing and health care (7th ed.). Elsevier.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (2016). Guidelines for preventing workplace violence for healthcare and social service workers (OSHA 3148-06R).