Introduction

Health Education England has acknowledged that there is a need to build and foster effective partnerships nationally and locally so that NHS library and knowledge services can ensure a consistent, equitable, funded core service to learners and staff and offer co-ordinated information to patients and the public (Health Education England, 2016). For public library services in England, Libraries Connected has a well established Universal Health Offer. This builds on the recognition of libraries as trusted spaces that deliver health information and recreational activities to help people better manage their health and wellbeing.

In effect, working with partners is an essential element of service delivery for information practitioners and healthcare decision makers. This chapter will explore the current context for cross-sector partnership working to help you identify potential internal and external partnerships within a health information setting, using case studies as examples. This will enable you to recognise the advantages that partnership working can bring to all involved. The chapter will also describe the key factors for effective partnership working, give some suggestions for implementing and embedding these and consider appropriate outcome measures to capture the impact of partnership working.

This chapter will help you think about partnership working in your current role and provide you with ideas about how to develop your skills and knowledge in this area. Throughout this chapter, we’ve included reflection points to help you think about how you would apply your learning in the real world. For more information on reflective practice and how it can be applied in librarianship see Chapter 11 and also Miller, Ford and Yang (2020).

Current context for cross-sector partnership working

Health Education England (2021) recognises the importance of cross-sector partnership working and the benefit this can have to individuals, organisations and society.

The two case studies discussed in this chapter illustrate this in practice. The first case study is based on an internal partnership within a trust setting and the second case study is a local partnership between differing organisations with a shared goal and interest in health and social care information.

Many educational or healthcare organisations will have a strategic vision discussing and documenting how they support communities’ lifelong learning and encourage cross-sector working and collaboration to support and enhance the development of organisational goals and workforce knowledge and skills.