%0 Journal Article
%T Using a Stages Model to Reveal the Politics in the Health Policy Process Comment on "Modelling the Health Policy Process: One Size Fits All or Horses for Courses?"
%A Sheaff R
%J Int J Health Policy Manag
%V 12
%N 0
%D 2023
%M 37579367
%F 4.967
%R 10.34172/ijhpm.2023.8066
%X Models of the health policy process have largely developed in isolation from political studies more widely. Of the models which Powell and Mannion's editorial considers, a stages model of the policy process offers a framework for combining these specifically health-focused models with empirical findings and more general explanatory models of the policy process drawn from other political studies. This commentary uses a stages model to assemble a bricolage which combines some of these components. That identifies a further research task and suggests ways of revealing in more life-like ways the politics involved in the health policy process: that is, how that process channels wider, often conflicting, non-health interests, actors, policies, conflicts, ideologies and sources of power from outside the health system into health policy formation, and introduces non-rationality.