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NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 19 ??? The Academy???s Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health has received a $6.87 million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to develop partnership-building tools that will help people and organizations work together more productively to solve pervasive community health problems.
A community partnership may include radically different members, and the powerful tend to steer the agenda even though others can valuably contribute, said Dr. Roz D. Lasker, Director of the Academy???s Center. The new tools will help ensure that all partnership participants ??? from hospital administrators to faith-based leaders to neighborhood residents???have an equal voice despite political, socioeconomic and ethnic differences. No proven roadmap now exists to building a successful partnership.
???To give participants a real influence, the process needs to be designed and run by its diverse participants,??? Lasker said.
The new grant is among the largest that the Academy has ever received. By 2006, it should result in partnership assessment tools and practice guides that will be widely available to communities and funders nationwide. The Academy???s Center will in 2003 form a national workgroup comprised of communities that have succeeded at collaborations, as well as educators and qualitative researchers. The team will document methods by which partnerships achieve success, and develop effective techniques for teaching those critical leadership and management skills to others.
???We???re going to have evidence about what it takes to make this work and give people the tools to do so,??? Lasker said. The tools will be usable by all types of partnerships, not solely those focused on health.
The new initiative builds on the Center???s significant work over the last four years, much of it funded by the Kellogg Foundation. ???Collaboration and community participation are important parts of the Foundation???s legacy,??? explained Barbara J. Sabol, Program Director of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. ???In this project, we expect The New York Academy of Medicine to continue that legacy by working with communities to improve public health nationwide through development of community-based public/private partnerships and models to strengthen public health practices.???
The Center???s research on partnership synergy has already spawned the web based Partnership Self Assessment Tool (www.PartnershipTool.net), which partnerships are using to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. The Center has also developed a model that explains, for the first time, how broad participation strengthens the capacity of communities to identify, understand and solve complex problems. (A paper on the model will appear in the Academy???s March 2003 Journal of Urban Health). The model synthesizes what has been learned about community collaboration over the last 40 years. It was an important achievement of the Kellogg Foundation???s Turning Point initiative, a 14-state project in which 41 communities identified uses for collaboration in addressing public health problems.
Although thousands of partnerships have been established to tackle problems affecting our well-being???such as substance abuse, terrorism and inadequate access to care???they have been unable to achieve widespread success, Lasker said. That may be about to change. ???Communities are finding it extremely difficult to run and sustain partnerships, and funders are looking for ways to get more out of their investment,??? she said. ???Our work suggests that both can be far more successful if they change the way they go about collaboration.??? Applications to join the new national workgroup will be available to community partnerships in early 2003 at www.cacsh.org.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 1930 to help people improve their quality of life and that of future generations through the practical application of knowledge and resources. The New York Academy of Medicine is a non-profit institution founded in 1847 that is dedicated to enhancing the health of the public through research, education and advocacy, with a particular focus on urban populations, especially the disadvantaged.
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Posted on December 19, 2002
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The 2012-2013 Duncan Clark Lecture - The Affordable Care Act: An Insider’s View
Featured Speaker: Sherry Glied, PhD, former Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
November 19, 2012 - The NYAM Section on Health Care Delivery welcomes Sherry Glied, PhD, former Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who will deliver the 2012-2013 Duncan Clark Lecture on "The Affordable Care Act: An Insider's View."
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The New York Academy of Medicine with support from the New York State Heath Foundation released a new report, Federal Health Care Reform in New York State: A Population Health Perspective.
This report identifies opportunities that build on both the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) and New York’s ongoing efforts toward improving the health of its 19 million residents.
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