Conversation starters: Getting to know each other in a health justice partnership

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.

This tip is part of our series, Effective Health Justice Partnership – practical tips for purposeful communication. To support practitioners to purposefully communicate while partnering, we’ve taken some of the building blocks to HJP and translated them into prompts you can use when meeting, emailing or talking with your 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.  

The first step: get to know each other

When working in partnership it’s easy to skip getting to know one another and instead, dive straight into the day-to-day work. By exploring each partner’s expectations, motivations and everyday work life, you can better understand and work towards achieving your shared goals. Plus, you’ll set solid foundations right from the start – getting to know each other builds trust and connection, both of which are essential to a strong partnership.   

To help you get started, we’ve provided some prompts below which you might find useful when getting to know your partner. 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.  

Maintaining or starting a health justice partnership? Use these conversation prompts

• 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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