Communication is core to building and maintaining effective health justice partnerships (HJPs). Good communication not only conveys a message, but also builds trusting relationships. And like many other partnership skills, it can help strengthen your HJP to better enable you achieve your goals. So if you’re starting a health justice partnership, try using the conversation prompts below to begin building trust and to kick the partnership off on the right foot.
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 first 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
- Tip #5: Talk about what you’ll do together in partnership
- Tip #6: How to talk to your partner about monitoring, evaluation and learning
- Tip #7: How to review the way you partner
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’s your previous experience of partnership?
- What did you like and what would you prefer not to carry over into this partnership?
- What attributes do you most value when working with others? E.g., honesty, discretion, other?
- What does a typical work day look like for you?
- How are decisions made at your organisation?
- What’s your biggest priority when it comes to your shared patients/clients? What should your partner be aware of so they can best contribute to that priority?
- What keeps you motivated to work in partnership?
Summarise the actions you will take together
Once you’ve heard each other’s perspective, take some time to summarise what you’ve learnt about your partner and the actions you’ll now take together. For example, you could:
- Refer to the partnership’s motivations and drivers in partnership meetings (e.g., ‘we talked about x, y, and z as being important in our partnership when we were building it. How are we tracking against those things? Has anything changed? What does this mean for the work we do now?’)
- Add the ways you want to work together, or your shared partnership values, to a section of your MOU so it can be regularly revisited.
- Use the priorities you each come up with for your shared patients/clients to inform some of your shared activities (e.g., the process for your shared patients/client meetings, or for information sharing.)
For more information on getting to know each other, see our resource, Building blocks for health justice partnership development (particularly the section ‘Agreeing on how you’ll work together’).
Next up in Effective Health Justice Partnership series
Whether you’re maintaining or starting a health justice partnership, this series of conversation starters can be useful to keep in your back pocket for the next email or catch-up with your partner. Up next, we share 7 questions to help you put your health justice partnership on common ground and working out your shared problem. These are essential steps in building an effective partnership.
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