The activities you undertake in partnership should be directly related to your shared goals. What these activities look like for your partnership depends on the needs you have identified within your local context and the resources you have available.
Effective Health Justice Partnerships: The series
To support practitioners to purposefully communicate while partnering, we’ve created a series of tips for HJPs you can use when meeting, emailing or talking with your 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 fifth 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 #4: 10 practical questions to help determine how you’ll work together
- 6-7 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.
- What will the referral pathways in your partnership look like?
- What kinds of interdisciplinary relationship building, training and learning will you do? (e.g., not only legal to health/community/social service but also vice-versa; dedicated workshops, team meetings.)
- Will you participate in secondary consultation in partnership? If so, then discuss the value-add your HJP might see as a result, how you will document and report this, the scope that each partner is able to provide, and what information or training might be needed to do this well.
- Will your partnership participate in case coordination? If so, then discuss the value-add your partnership might see as a result, the scope of team-based, coordinated care in your partnership, and what training, information and support might be needed to enable care coordination activity in your HJP.
- Will you want to combine any advocacy efforts you are each currently doing and work together for any shared advocacy? If so, then discuss what evidence or stories you might want to collect to support potential shared advocacy efforts.
- To what extent will the activities identified above help you to achieve your shared goal? After reflecting on this, do you need to revise either your goal or your activities?
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 what you want to do together and reflect on this in your joint meetings.
- Add the activities you’d like to do together to a section of your MOU so they can be regularly revisited.
- Use a tool like a program logic to map out the changes you expect to see as a result of your activities, and how those changes contribute to achieving your goal.
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, particularly the section ‘Identifying what you’ll do 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 monitoring, evaluation and learning in partnership.
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.
