Section IV: Developing Partnerships

This section of the course provides an overview of public health partnerships, including the benefits of partnerships, success factors for seeking potential partners and implementing partnerships, and overcoming potential pitfalls in partnership development. We will demonstrate partnership concepts with examples from organizations that developed partnerships to address the public health burden of arthritis.

In the previous sections of this course, we introduced arthritis as a public health challenge. In this section, we will use arthritis as the example to think through issues in partnership development. To begin, think about a specific public health intervention related to arthritis that a partnership could address in your community. (If you wish, you may use the same intervention you identified in the previous section). In the box below, briefly describe (1) the need for the intervention, (2) the objectives of the intervention, and (3) the intervention itself. Check the example if you need some help.

Describe a public health intervention related to reducing the burden of arthritis that a partnership could address in your community. Need for the intervention: Description of the intervention: Objectives of the intervention:

Please be sure to print your responses to the exercises before you continue to the next page so that you can refer to them later.

Keep your intervention in mind. We will use it to work through exercises about developing partnerships throughout this section of the course.