Working out your shared problem is an essential step in building an effective health justice partnership. It puts the partnership on common ground and partners can buy into a mutually beneficial approach. Copy and paste the questions below into your next email or meeting agenda to continue to support effective communication in your health justice partnership.
Asking questions to get clear on your shared problem can support effective communication in health justice partnership, and can also help ensure that you’re in a position to address the service gaps that your shared patients/clients may be experiencing.
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 second part in our series, Effective Health Justice Partnerships – practical tips for purposeful communication, and here we look at identifying the shared problem that you and your HJP partner may share.
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
- Tips #3-5: 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.
The conversation prompts
How to use the prompts below: copy and paste
You can copy the prompts below and paste them into your meeting agenda, in an email, or use them as a conversation starter over coffee. Amend or add to them to suit your needs.
- What is the need or problem that your service wants to address through partnership (for example, women’s, children’s and family safety)?
- What evidence do you have that this is a problem (including from lived experience voice, community voice, practice evidence, data or research)?
- Thinking about the problem from different perspectives, how would patients/clients describe this problem?
- How would executives/managers describe this problem?
- How would frontline staff describe this problem?
- What is missing or not working in the local service system in relation to this problem (for example, access to legal help for women, children and families is currently hard to access in a safe and practical way)?
- What role does your service have in relation to this problem or need?
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 your shared problem is and the next steps you’ll now take together. For example, you could:
- Document your shared problem (both in terms of your patient/client needs and the capacity of your service to address those needs) to reflect upon in your joint meetings.
- Decide that you need more evidence about your shared problem, and start to design a shared activity (such a legal needs assessment, data review or consultation process) to gather this evidence
- Add your shared problem to a section of your MOU so it can be regularly revisited.
More resources to support effective communication in health justice partnership
Effective communication in health justice partnership is crucial. If you’d like additional support in exploring the shared problem in your health justice partnership:
- Refer to our theory of change for health justice partnership, which identifies a series of high-level outcomes and what resources, activities and outputs might be required to achieve them.
- See our resource, Building blocks for health justice partnership development, and the section ‘Agreeing on how you’ll work together’.
- Refer to needs assessment tools to help you identify the nature of health-harming legal need within your community’s context and the service gaps.
Next up in Effective Health Justice Partnership series
Up next, we’ll be sharing the prompts and conversation starters to help you understand what you can achieve in your health justice partnership together.
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!
