Research, Policy and Planning

Health and social care partnership working is a central feature of the current government’s approach to public policy. Yet despite this, and a proclaimed interest in evidence-based policy, partnerships have not empirically demonstrated that they produce better outcomes for service users. This is problematic because if partnerships are seen to have not delivered, this may result in the concept losing legitimacy in the eyes of the practice community. This paper argues that this may, in fact, be a result of the way in which we have attempted to evaluate partnerships – rather than an indication of the ineffectiveness of partnerships per se. After providing an overview of the various ways in which the ‘partnership’ label has been used in health and social care, the paper moves on to give an overview of the range of difficulties involved in evaluating partnerships. When it comes to evaluating partnerships the challenge is huge but not insurmountable – and may involve us asking different kinds of questions about partnerships than have tended to be investigated thus far. The paper then moves on to outline POET (Partnership Outcomes Evaluation Toolkit) which has been specifically designed to determine what kinds of partnership deliver what forms of outcomes, to whom and when.