Analysis of Partnership Working in Health and Social Care: A Report

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Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
1)................................................................................................................................................2
2)................................................................................................................................................4
3)................................................................................................................................................6
4)................................................................................................................................................9
5)..............................................................................................................................................13
REFERENCES.........................................................................................................................16
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INTRODUCTION
The present report gives an elaborate idea about partnership working in health and
social care. The report explains the philosophies of partnership working Role of politics
in partnership working is analyzed further. Descriptions of various policies are explained
in relation to partnership working. Perspectives of different stakeholders are evaluated
in the present report. Models and their application is critically ruled with help of research
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analysis. Role of interpersonal relationships on partnership working is highlighted.
Patients, nurses, doctors, hospital staff, social workers and some external agencies
together work as a team to give better health and care to service users. Good
communication between all stakeholders enhances better understanding. This will
ultimately help focus on a common goal. Some attributes of the partnership are trust,
respect for partners, joint working, teamwork, common goals, common interest,
empathy, objective agreement etc. (Hazenberg et al, 2016)
1)
Philosophies of Partnership Working:
Working in partnership in health and social care demands mutual understanding and
joint working with different segments of the team. Partnership working in health care is
essential to growing the organization. A wide range of Stakeholders needs to work hand
in hand for a quality outcome. Effective implementation of models and theories bring
knowledge and skills to organizations. The good working partnership between
stakeholders helps every individual to conduct his role and responsibility seriously.
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Autonomy: It allows the right to choice of decision and freedom. The high authority will
provide its employee's freedom to make a choice that will help succeed goals.
(Leathard, 2004).
Empowerment: Management practice where power is allotted and the information are
shared. It will help find a solution to problems and improve the performance of services.
(Reeves et al. 2014).
Respect: It is the acknowledgement for a co-worker, or other stakeholder or working of
the organization together. This revolves around respect of the patient as well.
Making Informal Choices: Individuals other than their roles need to make use of
communication and information, finding facts that will improve procedures in services.
The partnership members need to be ready to negotiate at times, where support is
needed. For instance, help for people with mental issues or disability or elderly patients.
The primary essence of partnership working is sharing or allotment of the task.
Problems need to agree upon or disagree with valid reasons when a problem arises.
Certain terms of Partnership working are
1. Collaboration
2. Co-operation
3. Mutual and proactive participation
4. Problems, consequences and solutions
5. Sharing knowledge
6. Working as a team
7. Interdisciplinary working jointly
8. Networking potential
Service Users will form a relationship with stakeholders like nurses, GP, consultant,
therapist, educationalist, social worker, care manager, support manager etc.
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Theory of Change: To see an outcome there is a continuous process going on from the
start point. The start point is the answer to where we are now, what we want to achieve
becomes the outcome and what to do to achieve in the process. Joint working increases
the level of discussion and will solve all these questions. Team discussion will evolve a
set of common goals that will be achieved by implementing changes. (Gasby et al,
2011).
2)
Politics of Partnership Working
Examining, judging and debating of interprofessional working leads to dispute among
partnership bond. Politics is an important barrier to partnership working. Corruption
tends to be a hurdle of partnership working in good faith. Lack of transparency
regarding finances is seen. Corruption managed through political pressure. Less
incentive basis for a member of the team, when working in share leads to interpersonal
conflict. There is the imbalance of Power among authorities. This creates interpersonal
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tensions and partnership performance will be reduced. Working together should be
enabled by a set of rules and regulations among stakeholders.
Partnership working and policies:
In order to address local services effectively, there is a number of policies:
Care Act 2014: The act agreed upon need on partnership working. Too many laws
regarding care services have led to confusion. So establishing a single law policy was
needed. The act clarified that it improved mutual understanding among authorities and
agencies about clear individual roles. The act ruled out flaws of the previous team
working. The care act legislation implemented an integrated way of managing work to
get the good outcome of delivering the best care.
Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is an external statutory body in the UK. It
maintains regulations of nurses, midwives and community public health. It is
helping to maintain the professional standard for training, education of nurses.
The council ensures the best patient and nurse relationship. It is actively
working in partnership with hospitals to investigate faults in services of health
and social care and repair them. (World Health Organization, 2009)
Health and social care act 2012: The act promoted joint working on how authorities
along with commission group partnership can meet challenges effectively. National and
local streamlining of groups are needed to promote partnership working. Clarification is
important for an individual to avoid confusion and repetition of work. Local authorities
should frame effective strategies by communication with other stakeholders.
Mental capacity act 2005: The aim of this act was to deliver effective decision making
among individuals admitted in the mental hospital, who are unable to an effective
decision. The services should assess the mental capacity of the individual and analyze
the decision that is going to affect the life of the individual. As per the act, the right to the
decision should be given to every individual. Any decision that can help, support and
benefit the individual and make him happy should strongly be supported. Caregivers
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should help the individual make the correct decision. Raising the standard of quality
services, as they directly affect the service users. Hence all segments of a chain like
nurses, doctors, social workers, family caregivers should work unitedly to deliver the
best care for mental patients. (Stevens, Emma, 2013)
3)
The perspective of different stakeholders
Quality of care depends on the ability of caretakers to improve health, practitioner,
nurses and patient relationship. Availability of amenities and other effective care
services increase the quality of care. The interpersonal relation and working of different
stakeholders are very crucial in partnership working. The health care professionals like
doctors, nurses, another service provider like hospital staff, administrative staff, patients
and external regulators are all stakeholders and their perspective will help improve
health for the public.
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Perspective of Employee, Service provider: Higher authority should appreciate work
done by employees at regular interval. Appreciation will enhance productivity of
employee and their interest in work will increase. The roles should be allotted as per
designation. Workload needs to be equally distributed. Good quality of care can be
provided only by efficient work by service provider. Management should look into issue
of employee and resolve them as soon as possible. Issues like delaying monthly
salaries or unsatisfactory wages and excess work need to be addressed by conducting
joint meetings. Service providers should be provided with training of new skills, access
to new information technology. If there is any change in the system, the employee's
views should be considered. Meetings between employee and organization higher
authorities should be conducted time to time. Meetings will bring strong mutual
understanding regarding work and common goals. A highly qualified staff can bring best
outcome in care services.
Perspective of Service Users: Service users would be the ultimate people
who would be affected by the quality of the health and social care services.
This could be due to a new approach or it could be due to a new medicine
in the treatment modality. Any new inclusions in the treatment plan should
be first measured against the safety measures and then only they should
be allowed in practice.
Social care workers are sometimes also required to guide the service users
who are new to the system with limited understanding. If resources are
utilized optimally and time is managed along with the quality of services
then it would definitely reduce the waiting period for service users. A
service user also has the right to seek information regarding the kind of
services he or she would require. They also have a right to make decisions
on the basis of various information’s available to them. Working in
partnership will help in improving quality of the services and service
monitoring team can also be engaged to monitor quality of the services and
it can also act as a moderator between various departments.
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3. Perspective external bodies: External regulatory agencies like Nursing
and Midwifery Council (NMC) which is charity commission, Care quality commission
(CQC) National Institute of care excellence (NICE), etc are working to improve quality
and standard health and social care. Collaboration with hospitals and other health
organization can facilitate to solve the issue of poor quality services. External agencies
when working in partnership can rule out major problems like funding and are capable
to solve them at national and international level. Communication by external agencies
with different organization brings new strategy implementation in care services.
( Mohammad Mosadeghrad, A., 2013.)
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4)
Partnership, as described, refers to the teamwork or number of professionals working
together to achieve one common goal (Doel and Marsh, 2017). The partnership working
is always planned y different models and explained through them. The models of
partnership working help in better understanding of the goals that the team has to
achieve and how the members have to work in order to achieve that goal. There are
following models of partnership explained below
Networking
It is the most common and simple method of teamwork where different organizations
come together to discuss their cumulative goals and share their experiences. This kind
of model of partnership enables the organization to come together without any bondage
and work together for better results.
Multi-agency model
In this kind of model, the organizations, as well as agencies from different fields, come
together to work or a common aim. As in health and social care organizations, the
community care, health care, rehabilitation centres, pharmacy, hospitals, social care,
nursing etc. all get together to work in collaboration for the common goal (Cook,
Krishnan and Rashidi, 2013).
Unified model of partnership
The main aim of such a model as the name suggests is to harmonize the present
resources and services to bring a better result for the service user with better quality of
services. The model brings together existing tools, technical support, funding, etc. This
model works well in health and social care as it provides better care and better resource
utilization. It includes management, staffing and training as main aspects of the
partnership. The main structure is to integrate the services and distribute to the service
user.
Coalition Model:
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It is an independent leading model. There is no legal identity between the collaboration
of organizations. One of the legal organizations will lead and accomplish responsibilities
of funds, recruiting staff, subcenter management etc. The funding trust often prefers
lead model as they deal with only one legal organization but there can be an overload of
smaller contracts. This kind of partnership can sometimes be risky as the agreement is
essential and there can be disputes to rights. Coalition model is generally a fixed term
partnership.
This business partnership model is referred to as the model where the partnership is an
informal manner to achieve the common goals. The organizations in this sort of
partnership poles together with the resources and funding but the human resources will
be separate for each of them. This type of model is suitable where the distinctive
approach for partnership is not required. One most common limitation of this model is
that the loyalties of the partners are at stake and in danger due to dependence (Cook,
Krishnan and Rashidi, 2013).
This partnership working can help combine services on a temporary basis for a limited
time duration. Some benefits of this model have widened resources; cost-effectiveness;
proper identification of problem; autonomy for the individual; objectives are well defined.
Steering up partnership model
This kind of model has a formal agreement to some level among the partners. The
group is led by one and the goals are achieved by the employees and access to all
resources together. It is best suited where cross-organizational service deliverance is
required as in health and social care. The limitation of this model is that the spate
identities if required cannot be established by this (Acharya et al, 2017).
Hybrid model of partnership
This model as indicated is a mixture of two models that have qualities of coalition as
well as unified models of partnership. It has features of a coalition where staffing and
training are not required as well it uses the unified model for its resources harmonization
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and best utilization of care and services. This model is best suited for the health and
social care organization where both the aspects of care as required and works well by
promoting better results (Acharya et al, 2017).
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Interpersonal skills are referred to as the ability of a person to communicate or interact
with others. In health and social care, interpersonal skills are highly required as the
service provider has to be very good at communicating with the patients, other
professionals as well as people in the health and social care setting ( McCulloch,
Rathbone and Catchpole, 2011). Communication plays a vital role in health and social
care and it promotes better service delivery and better scope for outcomes. While a
professional is working in a team or in partnership with others it is necessary to
communicate well as without communication the partnership will not be fruitful. It is also
seen that the majority of cases of partnership that fails in health and social care is due
to a lack of communication skills and knowledge of interaction.
Making informed choices is one of the crucial philosophies of partnership working and it
refers to getting along at work with each other to make shared decisions for the careful
planning of the patient. This goal requires communication as its vital part.
Communication if not present in an adequate and appropriate manner cannot result in
informed decision among the partners and will lead to chaos and conflicts. Also, the
relationships among the staff member and the patient depend on effective
communication (McCulloch, Rathbone and Catchpole, 2011). Interpersonal skills are a
necessity for the health care professionals; a health care professional should know how
to communicate with the patient as per the standards of nursing guidance and also
ensures the extent of the relationship with the patient and other staff members. Lack of
interpersonal skills produce low-quality services and also leads to limited relationships
among the team members. It is presented as the major barrier in partnership working.
Communication helps in understanding the shared opinion of every team member that
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