You only get what you ask for

09 Dec You only get what you ask for

Dear Here to Help,

We are a small industry association, with a limited budget, and have been talking about doing advocacy for some years now. However, we haven’t had any impact in advocacy to date and we feel advocacy-stagnant.

We represent clinicians and one of our key advocacy goals is to reduce the incidence of chronic disease in indigenous communities. Indigenous communities bear higher chronic disease burdens.

Do you have any suggestions to help us advocate better on behalf of our member clinicians?

Thank you for your query.

There are 2 key advocacy tips for associations: (1) go for easy wins first, (2) have some data to back it up.

It’s important to begin your advocacy journey by identifying “low hanging fruit” advocacy goals. This will help build your – and your members – confidence and skills in advocacy.

The best place to start is your members’ expertise and their contribution to the community.

What community problem/s are your members good at solving?

What are the key obstacles to your members doing that even better?

Good data is key to successful advocacy.

In the health world, States and Territories across Australia have differing approaches to funding, staffing and outfitting key health services for chronic diseases. Each health service then implements (or doesn’t implement) its State government’s approach in its own way. This means there are many models of care across Australia and clinicians are often frustrated when their service doesn’t have the same (or even similar) levels of staffing or outfitting compared to their neighbours.

Would your members be interested in assistance “advocating” to their local health services to better meet their State or Territory government’s published models of care?

Do you have an evidence-based best practice model for your area of care? Researching and producing a best practice model of care is an obvious starting point to improving your advocacy capabilities and outcomes.

These advocacy goals would deliver immediate outcomes for your members and help improve their day-to-day working lives.

Please let me know how you go.

This article comes from my column entitled “Here to Help” in Hunter Local, December 2024. If you have an everyday problem just begging for a simple, real world solution, send it to “Here to Help” and let’s see what we can achieve.

Elaine Abery has a closet full of great ideas and empowering solutions. She’s also the Director of Unravelling Red Tape, a company dedicated to helping everyday people, not-for-profits and companies change the world through improved decision-making and legislation.