Building a shared understanding of how you’ll work together to achieve shared goals – over and above what you’ll do to achieve them – is an important step in laying the right foundations for an effective, purpose-driven partnership.
Effective Health Justice Partnerships: The series
To support practitioners to purposefully communicate while partnering, we’ve created a series of prompts you can use when meeting, emailing or talking with your health justice partnership (HJP) partner. Whichever way you go about it, we encourage you to find a balance between sharing your own perspectives and seeking out and listening carefully to your partner’s.
This is the forth part in our series, Effective Health Justice Partnerships – practical tips for purposeful communication.
Jump to any of the parts in our series below:
- Tip #1: Conversation starters: Getting to know each other in a health justice partnership
- Tip #2: 7 questions to help you put your health justice partnership on common ground
- Tip #3: Understanding what you can achieve together: 5 prompts to get you started
- Tip #5-7 coming soon.
This series of tips is designed to help you and your partner with communication in health justice partnership – which is core to building and maintaining effective HJPs. And like many other partnership skills, it can be undertaken with a deeper purpose in order to strengthen your HJP. You can use communication to not only convey a message, but also in building trusting relationships to achieve your HJP goals.
Use these conversation prompts
Copy & paste the prompts below
To help you get started, we’ve provided some prompts below which you might find useful to raise when working out what you want to achieve together. You can do this through whatever form of communication suits your partnership best – it could be as a meeting agenda, via email, or as a conversation starter over coffee.
- How often and when is your partnership going to meet?
- When you have partnership meetings, who will be the meeting facilitator, the notetaker and the timekeeper?
- How will you best communicate with one another on a day-to-day bases (e.g., phone, email…)
- When problems arise in the partnership, how will they be best raised?
- What is the decision-making process in your partnership?
- What approval processes are required in your partnership?
- How will you record shared actions in the partnership and when will you revisit them?
- What arrangements will you need in regard to setting, space and other requirements when on site (e.g., room, desk, a computer…)
- How will you share logos and maintain copyright in that process?
- How will you establish processes for consent, confidentiality, privacy and legal privilege?
Summarise the actions you will take together
Once you’ve discussed these questions and heard each other’s perspective, take some time to summarise what you want to achieve by working together and the next steps you’ll now take together. For example, you could:
- Document how you’d like to work together as a check-in point to reflect upon and update if needed in your joint meetings.
- Add how you’d like to work together to your MOU.
Access more help and support
Effective communication in health justice partnership is crucial. If you’d like additional support in exploring the shared problem in your health justice partnership:
- See our resource, Building blocks for health justice partnership development, and the section ‘Agreeing on how you’ll work together’.
- Download our Entering into a health justice partnership: Memorandum of understanding resource kit for guidance on what you can include when developing an MOU.
Next up in Effective Health Justice Partnership series
Up next, we’ll be exploring how to talk about what you’d like to do together in partnership and more. Stay tuned!
If you’d like more before then, and are not already part of the National HJP Practitioner Network, sign up below to join the community.
