Building effective health justice partnerships requires partners to pay attention to how they work together, not just what they do. One way to monitor this is by setting up processes to regularly review and talk about the way you are partnering.
Reflecting on your HJP will involve looking at your relationships (the connection between partners, shared clarity of roles), resources (what each partner contributes, what is needed to achieve your shared goals) and processes (your communication, how you make decisions, partnership governance structures, how you share information and how you collect data).
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.
- To what extent do all partners feel they know each other’s priorities when it comes to your shared patients/clients, discussed in Tip 1 (get to know each other)?
- Reflecting on Tip 2 (work out your shared problem), is the problem still the same, or does it need to be revised considering the experience you have gained working in partnership together?
- To what extent are all partners satisfied with the partnership approach in achieving the shared goals you identified in Tip 3 (describe what you want to achieve together that you can’t achieve by working alone)?
- To what extent are all partners satisfied with how you are working together overall, as identified in Tip 4 (talk about how you’ll work together in partnership)?
- To what extent have the activities you outlined in Tip 5 (talk about what you’ll do together), and have undertaken since, helped you to achieve your shared goals?
- In reviewing your efforts outlined in Tip 6 (talk about monitoring, evaluation and learning in partnership) to what extent is the partnership satisfied with your approach to date?
- Reflecting on the answers above – what are your strengths, areas for development and opportunities for alternative ways of working in partnership?
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:
- Note areas for development and the possibilities you have identified for working differently to reflect on in your joint meetings.
- Make updates to your MOU / documented partnership agreement in light of your discussion.
Access more help and support
If you’d like additional support in exploring effective monitoring, evaluation and learning in partnership:
- If you’re ready for a more structured review of your partnership, we have a dedicated resource to help, which includes questions you can answer together as you review your partnership relationships, resources, and processes. There’s also an action plan template to help you identify and plan your collective next steps.
- Health Justice Australia also has a tailored program, Partnership Health Check, which offers a facilitated and in-depth process for reviewing your partnership.
