Defining why partnership will help make a difference to your shared problem can lay great foundations for working together. Use the prompts we’ve shared below to continue to support effective communication in your health justice partnership.
Getting clear on why partnership will help make a difference provides motivation on what it is you can achieve together in your health justice partnership (HJP), that you otherwise can’t achieve by working alone. What this difference looks like for your partnership will depend on the needs of your community.
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 third 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 #4-5: 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.
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.
- Describe why partnering will help to make a difference to the need or problem? If you haven’t define the need or problem in your health justice partnership yet, see, Five questions to help you put your HJP on common ground.
- What would it look like if you ‘solved’ the need or problem?
- In thinking about solving this problem from different perspectives, how would patients/clients describe what this looks like?
- How would executives/managers describe what this looks like?
- How would frontline staff describe what this looks like?
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 achieve together and reflect upon this in your joint meetings.
- Add your shared goals to a section of your MOU so they can be regularly revisited. To learn more about how to put together a memorandum of understanding for your HJP, see our MOU Resource Kit for entering into a health justice partnership.
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:
- 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 ‘Understanding the needs and service gaps’.
Next up in Effective Health Justice Partnership series
Up next, we’ll be sharing how you can set the scene for great ongoing conversations in your health justice partnership. 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.
