Partnership tools for health promotion: are they worth the effort?

In health promotion and community sector programs, working through partnerships has become a key strategy for capacity building and infrastructure development that is intended to achieve better health outcomes. Government and funding agencies are providing significant support for partnership work in the apparent belief that partnerships are more likely to improve sustainability of programs and their outcomes than single agencies working alone. Online partnership analysis tools are designed for organisations to measure the effectiveness of their collaborative endeavours, and to demonstrate to funding bodies that the partnership was worthwhile. The tools are predominantly self-assessment evaluation tools but there is a lack of clarity about what these tools actually set out to measure. Self-assessment tools assist partners to recognise strengths and weaknesses in their practice, but analysis of their intentions indicates that there are significant problems with the 'snapshot' data that is generated in terms of analysing effectiveness. Partnership work is complex, dynamic and context specific with varying synergistic rewards which cannot always be represented in survey tools. This article reports analysis of online self-assessment partnership tools which have data-generating capacity, to determine just what they measure and to understand how effective they can be in evaluating collaborative practice. Criteria for analysis were developed from a review of the existing literature. The review and analysis has highlighted that practitioners must consider what they are measuring and for what purpose they seek to evaluate before utilising and implementing a partnership analysis tool.