Oral

In order to achieve the goal of enhancing public health outcomes, especially for vulnerable populations, partnerships and coalition-building are often essential. This presentation will focus on a variety of such efforts. We begin with a strategy to enhance the public health workforce through a partnership between a local public health department and an academic institution. We will next focus on collaboration among health care provider agencies in a New York City community, East Harlem. Through this collaboration, East Harlem became the community in which New York City's first immunization registry was piloted, and a process for community-based monitoring of ambulatory care referrals was developed and implemented. Our next presentation will discuss the collaboration of public health departments and academic institutions training public health professionals so that these students can be taught the community aspects of their practice. This will be followed by a presentation on how methods of social network analysis may be used for quantitative evaluation of the effects of partnerships on performance indicators of a county public health system, using a combination of qualitative (case study) and quantitative (social network analysis) methods. Finally, we will present a review of the evidence of the effectiveness of partnerships, identify gaps in the literature and suggest directions of future research.

Session Objectives: At the end of this presentation, participants will be better able to: • Define critical success factors of a successful grassroots community health coalition and strategies used to sustain them in a diverse urban community • Describe the function of a community action planning process and its role in a an urban community • Describe the methods that have been used to explore the breadth and scope of current partnerships between health professions schools and public health departments. • Understand a new application of social network analysis in public health • Understand gaps in the partnership evaluation literature and possible directions of future partnerships research

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing