Policy?

Most anyone who has dealt with non-profit organizations at the board level has had an opportunity to deal with policy vs procedure.

I am working on the Policy and Procedure manuals for our facility. Our Resident Services director and I have just gone through the old book. What we discovered was hysterically funny as well as blatantly ignorant. Not only did those who went before us not know the difference between policy and procedure, they decided that every operational task and expectation was a policy, wrote it so and the ED signed off on it.

There was one policy that had us fluctuating between shock and laughter. The policy began (with the name changed for privacy reasons) “Kevin Buecher is the only resident who is allowed to have smoking materials because he has been grandfathered in….”

This was what they called a policy. In all reality, neither a  policy nor a procedure, not even an operations task. Not a goal, not an expectation.  The closest we could label it would be a service agreement for the individual and a backwards attempt at a facility rules statement.

Oy. This is going to be a long process.

~ by Cris on March 4, 2007.