Building a Better Orono Together: Cultivating Organic Community Connection with University and Orono Stakeholders Final Report

Final report for POS 364-365 Practicum in Engaged Policy Studies I and II with Professor Robert Glover, University of Maine

Building a Better Orono Together: Cultivating Organic Community Connection with University and Orono Stakeholders Report Summary

This project was undertaken as a collaboration between students in Professor Robert Glover\u27s 2012-2013 Engaged Policy Studies course, Orono Town Planner Evan Richert, and Orono Town Manager Sophie Wilson. The objective was to examine the university and community perceptions of Orono as a college town with focus on the Orono downtown area

6-STEPPs: A Modular Tool to Facilitate Clinician Participation in Fair Decisions for Funding New Cancer Drugs

To design a tool to assist clinician participation with cancer drug funding decisions. Public policy-makers and insurers are struggling with funding decisions regarding increasingly expensive new cancer drugs. Increasingly, oncologists are contributing to the process of review that leads to such decisions. We were asked to design a system for ranking new cancer drugs for priority-based funding decisions.Ye

Accounting for reasonableness: Exploring the personal internal framework affecting decisions about cancer drug funding

Objectives Drug decision-makers are involved in developing and implementing policy, procedure and processes to support health resource allocation regarding drug treatment formularies. A variety of approaches to decision-making, including formal decision-making frameworks, have been developed to support transparent and fair priority setting. Recently, a decision tool, 'The 6-STEPPPs Tool', was developed to assist in making decisions about new cancer drugs within the public health care system.Methods We conducted a qualitative study, utilizing focus groups and participant observation, in order to investigate the internal frameworks that supported and challenged individual participants as they applied this decision tool within a multi-stakeholder decision process.Results We discovered that health care resource allocation engaged not only the minds of decision-makers but profoundly called on the often conflicting values of the heart.Conclusions Objective decision-making frameworks for new drug therapies need to consider the subjective internal frameworks of decision-makers that affect decisions. Understanding the very human, internal turmoil experienced by individuals involved in health care resource allocation, sheds additional insight into how to account for reasonableness and how to better support difficult decisions through transparent, values-based resource allocation policy, procedures and processes.