Scholarly Article

“Public managers can choose from four types of cross-sector collaboration. Here's a look into the tradeoffs of each type.”

This article by Andrew Webber and Suzanne Mercure discusses the economic effect of poor population health and the role of the business community in population health improvement. The authors argue that businesses “[need] to understand population health and not focus just on the health of employees at the worksite,” and they “describe a long-term approach to population health, including incentives, and identify what is needed to engage business leadership in population health improvement.”

Karen DeSalvo, Patrick O’Carroll, Denise Koo, John Auerbach, and Judith Monroe wrote this piece as a call to action “to boldly expand the scope and reach of public health to address all factors that promote health and well-being, including those related to economic development, education, transportation, food, environment, and housing.” This article reviews the shift from Public Health 1.0 to Public Health 2.0, and now from Public Health 2.0 to Public Health 3.0. It also discusses the key components of Public Health 3.0.

Paul Simon and Jonathan Fielding “[make] the case for the business sector’s participation in the broad public health system and its support of governmental public health agencies. Examples of past and current partnerships exemplify how public health efforts benefit business and suggest opportunities for future collaboration to improve the public’s health.”

This article by Scutchfield, Prybil, Kelly, and Mays presents their findings from a study of 12 successful partnerships, in order to “investigate characteristics of effective collaboration between hospitals, their parent systems, and the public health community.” They share the lessons learned from site visits and interviews with key partnership participants involved in each of the 12 partnerships.

“This paper is a product of [the partnership between the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation Corporate Citizenship Center (USCCF) and the Action Collaborative on Business Engagement in Building Healthy Communities], exploring the business motivation for investing in community health, the processes involved in that effort, and the challenges stakeholders faced when pursuing these initiatives.”

This article, authored by Nicolaas P. Pronk, Catherine Baase, Jeanette May, Paul Terry, and Karen Moseley, reports on the “emergent priorities that matter most to business when considering active and intentional participation in multi-sector collaborations for community health improvement.” Please note, the article can only be accessed with purchase from the publisher.

This article reviews theoretical and empirical work on collaboration from the last decade. “Research indicates how complicated and challenging collaboration can be, even though it may be needed now more than ever. The article concludes with a summary of areas in which scholarship offers reasonably settled conclusions and an extensive list of recommendations for future research.”

In this article, researchers from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the RAND Corporation “analyze outstanding examples of partnership-driven work. [They] also study the challenges of how partner sectors outside the formal health system, such as organizations working in the education or housing sectors, can effectively lead collaborations. The analysis builds the evidence base for understanding and sustaining the impact of cross-sector collaboration on pubic health.” Please note that this article is only available with purchase from the publisher.

“In recent years, numerous efforts have arisen across the United States that explicitly seek to improve the public’s health by catalyzing collaboration across multiple societal sectors. In this article [the authors] identify, categorize, and describe an array of multisector initiatives and collaborations currently under way across the United States that explicitly include attention to social, economic, and environmental factors to foster community health and well-being.”