Promoting the Public's Health through Partnerships in Local Public Health Systems

Public health systems research suggests that certain partnerships within the community leads to improved performance within health systems. It is important to identify those characteristics of public health systems that form partnerships and engage both stakeholders and community citizens in public health programs. Once the features of public health systems that develop effective partnerships with stakeholders and community citizens are documented, researchers and practitioners can establish recommendations to local health departments about forming these partnerships. Additionally, local health systems will understand the range of activities and variety of partnerships needed to influence public health system performance. The National Public Health Performance Program has developed and field-tested the local public health systems performance instrument. This instrument is used by a number of public health jurisdictions to examine the performance of local public health systems. Analysis performed on this dataset focuses on those public health systems that have undertaken partnerships with the community and its stakeholders to identify significant variables affecting these relationships and how they influence the performance of public health systems. Our findings document the demographic and structural nature of high performing public health systems and their relationship with local community partners and residents. We identify those local systems features that successfully influence the creation of community engagement and its relationship to performance. Identification of variables helpful in creating the ideal public health system performance by community and stakeholder engagement will be beneficial to other local public health systems as they undertake similar activities to improve their performance.