Many health organizations struggle to meet their core business objectives in the face of resource constraints, and still ensure their relevance to their communities. More than ever, health organizations can better meet their business goals and improve their communities through partnerships. See our Top Ten Reasons for Making Community Health a Core Business Strategy.
We enjoy unsurpassed experience in understanding and helping to improve community health partnerships. We help brand new coalitions get beyond just talking. We help mature coalitions balance system improvement with the continuous need to increase inclusiveness and diversity. Since each partnership is both unique and ever changing, yet so rarely examined in a rigorous way, there are no substitutes for practical experience and tested methods.
Richard Bogue and Affiliates helps partnerships' leadership teams examine their challenges and create opportunities for improvement. Click on the topics below to learn about services we provide.
Community partnerships operate at several levels: personal, group, organizational and partnership. At the partnership level, common interests connect the other levels in common action, like a toothpick holding together layers of a club sandwich. Since partners depend on collaboration, no command and control decision-making model will do. Plus, many factors contribute to health: individual characteristics, personal choices, cultural traditions, organizational roles, political rules, and the environment itself. With so many issues competing for attention, achieving strategic focus challenges many partnerships. Community partnerships also bring the complexity that comes from the voluntary nature of much of the labor that makes them go. Partnership work is typically tacked onto people's other responsibilities.
These complexities make partnership success elusive. Richard Bogue and Affiliates played a central role in the nation's first multi-year evaluation of collaborative governance in community health partnerships. No one has more experience examining what makes community partnerships work, and helping partnerships examine themselves to get better. See Layers of Leadership for some of the basics. Contact us when you're ready to make some real progress.
From the exciting birth of a partnership to the satisfaction that comes from seeing real outcomes emerge from teamwork, community partnerships are constantly changing. No matter what stage you find yourself at now, your partnership can have a stronger future if you become explicitly aware of where you've come from and where you're likely to be going. Understanding the maturation process, from launch through the life cycles, can help community partnerships become more deliberate about their best bets for making strong progress in each stage of their maturation. Click on Trends to see how the context of community health partnerships has shifted as experience has accumulated. We give leadership teams the context they need to see how tomorrow's challenges may not be those of yesterday.