AHA News Now, August 21, 2017

Playbook for Fostering Hospital-Community Partnerships to Build a Culture of Health
Advancing population health involves fostering effective and sustainable hospital-community partnerships to better address community health issues and achieve a Culture of Health. Building a Culture of Health means creating a society that gives all individuals an equal opportunity to live the healthiest life they can, whatever their ethnic, geographic, racial, socioeconomic or physical circumstances may be. Download the Playbook.

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Health Research & Educational Trust has developed a playbook of effective methods, tools and strategies to create new partnerships and sustain successful existing ones. The playbook also incorporates lessons learned from HRET’s Learning in Collaborative Communities cohort, 10 communities from across the U.S. with strong, successful hospital-community partnerships. Site visits to these 10 communities yielded insights on how to manage, strengthen and accelerate collaborations effectively. New and existing partnerships can use innovative strategies, tools and worksheets in this playbook to:

• Identify partners and their assets
• Host community collaborative meetings
• Define roles and responsibilities in a collaborative
• Address common goals in a collaborative
• Create an action plan
• Measure partnership effectiveness
• Overcome obstacles
• Celebrate progress