Background

Often the activities and outputs of integrated services (“interprofessional and interorganisational partnerships”) are relatively easy to define. Taking health justice partnership as an example, this might be: the establishment of referral pathways; the development and delivery of interdisciplinary training; the provision of secondary consultation; and coordinated care of a shared cohort of service users. What can be harder to pinpoint and define are the principles that enable these collaborative outputs and activities to occur; and the capabilities that they depend upon among professionals and practitioners.

Effective interprofessional and interorganisational partnerships require investment not just in their outputs and activities, but for the scoping, building and maintaining of the relationships, processes and capabilities that enable them to happen.

Leveraging Health Justice Australia’s experience and expertise in brokering complex partnerships across health, legal and human services, this workshop will draw on frameworks and principles developed through the partnership brokerage and collective impact movements to work with delegates in exploring ‘what it takes’ to build and maintain effective interprofessional partnerships.

Aims and Objectives

This workshop links to and provides a skills building opportunity for conference participants following the ideas raised in the plenary on health justice partnership by Health Justice Australia’s Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine. Participants in this workshop will learn about the principles of partnership and explore how they can apply these to their integrated practice, drawing on examples from health justice partnerships across Australia and internationally. The workshop will identify what is meant by a ‘principled approach’ to partnering and explore how delegates might take these principles back to their own partnering endeavours.

Target audience

Open to anyone exploring collaborative service models and practice approaches, including integrated services, interorganisatioal partnerships and communities of practice.
Learnings/Take away
The key takeaways from this workshop will focus on the need for sustained and intentional investment over time in capability and capacity for effective interprofessional and interorgantisational partnership. Central to this investment is a principled approach that:

- acknowledges, relishes and activates the diversity of skills, knowledge and resources each partner brings and contributes to the partnership;

- builds and maintains an equitable approach;

- maps and integrates a process that is mutually beneficial for all involved;

- is profiled by openness and transparency; and

- recognises the courage that is required to give something up to find an alternative ‘third-way’ of working, particularly in the absence of predictable outcomes.