Collaborative Partnerships

Working collaboratively with other services to deliver client centred care is essential to delivering good client outcomes. As a health manager for a community-based organisation, collaborative partnerships happen at all levels of the organisation with varying degrees of success. Collaboration seems to be a buzz word among services, meaning that it is often stated, but less often achieved. Good collaboration relies on excellent communication and fails when there is a lack of accountability. Strong leadership and collaborative communication skills are necessary to effect change within healthcare systems (Al-Sawai, 2013). Within my current role we rely on good referral and care pathways being in place to support clients moving between services. Its is widely acknowledged that a person’s mental health and wellbeing are fluid, responsive to situational, emotional and physically changes. It is therefore essential for services to foresee this changeability and respond accordingly. As a mental health leader, I am responsible for ensuring that the clients that access my service receive appropriate care at the right time, whether it is from my service or another. The service that I currently run provides a range of primary care services for young people experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues. Often, we will have young people present in crisis, experiencing acute mental health issues such as suicidality. It is at times such as these that collaboration becomes not only essential but possibly lifesaving. It is also at these times that if becomes very clear where the failures in service provision lie. As a healthcare leader, I feel that it is my duty and responsibility to effect change where I can see that there are system failures. It was clear that steps needed to be taken to reduce the risk of clients falling between gaps in services. I instigated a meeting with service partners to talk about my concerns. The meeting resulted in the development of a shared care plan that was implemented immediately. The shared care plan is used to document support networks that are in place around a client at different stages of mental wellness. They are completed with the client for the client. The development of shared care plans relies on the collaboration of all stakeholders involved in clients care, including friends and family members, and ensure some level accountability of these stake holders, dependant of the presentation of the client at any given time.

Although I would like to say that shared care planning was the solution to good collaboration between services, I cannot. As with all relationships, collaborative partnerships need to be constantly nurtured too. Within a few months, the shared care plans had fallen by the way side as a result of staff turnover, lack of understanding regarding the benefits of shared plans and a lack of time and resources. As a result, communication and collaboration between the services also decreased and the old problems resurfaced. On reflection, evaluation and feedback mechanisms regarding the progress and success of the shared care planning strategy involving all services may have helped to maintain momentum. Feedback mechanisms are also an essential part of the change management process (Ginter et al., 2018). However, as part of a continuous quality improvement initiative, these have been valuable learnings that I hope will contribute to the eventual overall success of the strategy.

Al-Sawai, A. (2013). Leadership of healthcare professionals: where do we stand?. Oman

medical journal, 28(4), 285.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care

organizations. John Wiley & Sons

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