Educational partnerships for public health: do stakeholders perceive similar outcomes?

Based on a study of five W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded educational partnerships, this article reports the stakeholders' views on five sets of anticipated outcomes: health professions education impact, curricula and services, students, community and policy, and sustainability and structural change outcomes. The participants had a reasonable degree of certainty that their partnerships would achieve the intended outcomes. Using tightly defined "specific" stakeholder groups for the analyses reflected a more precise picture than employing "generic" groups. Partner groups that perceived greater certainty about the outcomes had higher scores on other related partnership parameters. For partnership working, the article proposes an orbital hypothesis of stakeholders' perceptions for further investigation.