Body sensor networks (BSNs) for healthcare put more emphasis on security and adaptation to changes in context and application requirement. Policy-based management enables flexible adaptive behaviour by supporting dynamic loading, enabling and disabling of policies without shutting down nodes. This overcomes many of the limitations of sensor operating systems, such as TinyOS, which do not support dynamic modification of code. Alternative schemes for network adaptation, such as networking programming, suffer from high communication cost and operational interruption. In addition, the policy-driven approach enables fine-grained access control through specifying authorization policies. This paper presents an efficient policy system called finger which enables policy interpretation and enforcement on distributed sensors to support sensor level adaptation and fine-grained access control. It features support for dynamic management of policies, minimization of resources usage, high responsiveness and node autonomy. The policy system is integrated as a TinyOS component, exposing simple, well-defined interfaces which can easily be used by application developers. The system performance in terms of processing latency and resource usage is evaluated.