Theme 1 - Partnership & Partnering
Benefits
- Partnerships can bring together a variety of skills and abilities to increase the benefits. The responsibilities and workload can be shared, this reduces pressure on one organisation.
- Risks are shared between partners.
- Including the majority of stakeholders will significantly improve the potential to make the "right" changes.
Disadvantages:
- Set up costs both financial and resources. Agreements need to be reached through consensus.
- It takes time for the partnership to function effectively as it goes through the "forming, storming, norming performing" stages.
- Decisions require consultation between partners if the partnership is to work effectively. Decision-making processes can be slowed with the potential for disagreement.
- If a partner "opts out" the dynamics of the partnership can change significantly.
What MHIP did
The Mental Health Improvement Partnership (MHIP) Programme was based on the whole system re-design through effective partnering. Unlike many previous re-design programmes the partnering was "inter" as well as "intra" organisational (that is, across partners as well as those within). The partnering took place at all levels of the programme through the national team which oversaw the programme as a whole through the Programme Board, the National Reference Group, through to local delivery of the programme at the front line.
The programme went through a lengthy engagement process with partners prior to commencement. This continued through out the duration of the programme.
As a part of the governance arrangements all pilot sites set up a Partnership Steering Group. In some sites this was a new group and in others the role was appended on to an existing group. All members of the Partnership Steering Group signed a commitment through either a Partnership Agreement or through signing up to the Programme Initiation Document.
Of significance to the success of maintaining the partnership was the use of effective communication strategies at both local and national level. This included regular briefings, highlight reports and engagement events.
To support the development of effective partnering a national learning event was held in January 2006. The afternoon of this event was facilitated by Ken Tooze who enabled the sharing of learning on effective partnering.
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