Walid El Ansari, M.D., D.T.M.&H., M.P.H., Ph.D.

Postgraduate Public Health Programme

School of Health and Social Care, Oxford Brookes University

Oxford, United Kingdom

Partnership building has been considered an imperative for the new millennium. Partnerships have emerged as widespread components of public health strategies on a wide range of issues and platforms. At the local level, partnership building has been recognized as a strategy for the reduction of immunization disparities (Findley et al., 2003) and the decrease of ethnic discrepancies in the utilization of community services and the improvement of preventive care in vulnerable populations (Crist and Escandon-Dominguez, 2003). At the national level, partnerships have been used in diverse public health policy perspectives, from public health preparedness in the United States (Morse, 2003) to improving the coordination of health and social care in the United Kingdom (Department of Health, 1992). At the international level, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labor Organization are strengthening the concept of public–private partnerships (Haroon, 2003), the Stop TB partnership initiative of the WHO advocates national partnerships for tuberculosis control (Steenbergen and El Ansari, 2003), and global public–private partnerships (Buse and Walt, 2000) and community-health services partnering for HIV/AIDS prevention (Goede and El Ansari, 2003) are becoming increasingly common. Whether the partnership is at the local (micro), national (meso), or international (macro) level, strategic planning has given way to strategic partnering, and the notion of competitive advantage has been transformed into the idea of collaborative advantage (Shannon, 1998). This report will focus on partnerships of the micro order: the local level where health providers, nursing teaching institutions, and community organizations and agencies come together.

Effective partnerships among government agencies, community-based organizations, and academic and medical institutions are advancing public health in the United States (Northridge, 2003) and South Africa (El Ansari et al., 2002). As the journey to tackling the long-standing health challenges progresses, there is a recognition that solutions lie within a broader framework than any individual efforts. Hence, there has been an expansion of the notion of partnerships to embrace those within and outside the health sector who can work collaboratively toward eliminating health disparities