Measuring partnership synergy and functioning: Multi-stakeholder collaboration in primary health care

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Organizational Psychology
• Public Health Policy

Background:

• Multi-stakeholder partnerships are increasingly common in primary health care for service improvement.
• Existing literature on enhancing partnership effectiveness is growing, but evidence on performance measurement is limited.
• Definitional ambiguity and measurement challenges hinder the assessment of complex collaborative processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt and evaluate the Partnership Self-Assessment Tool (PSAT) for measuring partnership functioning and synergy.
• To assess the reliability and validity of the adapted tool in real-world partnership settings.
• To identify areas for improvement in partnership assessment instruments.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the Partnership Self-Assessment Tool (PSAT) and distributed it to stakeholders in five partnerships across Canada and Australia.
• Included new sub-scales for communication and external environment, and assessed partnership synergy.
• Compared instrument-based rankings with independent qualitative evaluations.

Main Results:

• The adapted instrument effectively discriminated between different levels of partnership functioning and synergy.
• Sub-scales demonstrated sufficient reliability for individual and inter-partnership discrimination.
• Communication and External Environment sub-scales showed metric limitations, requiring further refinement.

Conclusions:

• The adapted PSAT is suitable for assessing partnership synergy and key functioning indicators.
• Further development of the Communication and External Environment sub-scales is recommended.
• The tool can be applied to evaluate internal partnership performance and collaborative process effectiveness.