It’s important to carve out space to talk about how your partnership will collect and use data to demonstrate the difference your partnership makes, and to improve your service delivery over time.
Your organisations might use different language to describe this work, including monitoring, evaluation, learning, feedback, and quality improvement.
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 sixth 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 are the reporting requirements for the funding that is supporting your partnership, and how will you meet those requirements?
- What are the different expectations you need to consider when it comes collecting and using data? For example, what will your respective management and governance committees want to see? Who will make decisions that you need evidence to influence?
- What kind of resources do you each have for this kind of work? Do you need to seek additional resources? For example, do your organisations have internal research or data support roles? Do you have funding to get support from an external evaluator?
- What data do you already capture? How can you make good use of this data to support your shared work?
- What additional data do you think you will need? What kind of ethics approval and consent requirements might be required to collect this data?
- What kind of data sharing between your organisations would be useful and what would be needed to make this happen?
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:
- Add details around how you will monitor and evaluate your partnership to a section of your MOU.
- Start designing a shared monitoring and evaluation plan
- Take steps towards commissioning external support or seeking additional funding
Access more help and support
If you’d like additional support in exploring effective monitoring, evaluation and learning in partnership:
- See our resource, Building blocks for health justice partnership development (particularly the sections ‘learning and evaluation’ and ‘leaning and evolving’.)
- See our resource, Advocacy tools for health justice partnership, which includes key messages you can copy and use in funding applications.
- 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 how to review your 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.
