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Mandated Intersectoral Collaboration: The Student Health Initiative Experience

Wendy Heffern, Capital Health
Andrew McDonald, Capital Health
Daria Wallsten, Keeweetinok Lakes Regional Health Authority

Background:

Over the past decade, collaboration among service providers and across sectors has been used as a strategy to decrease costs, increase effectiveness, and decrease duplication in the delivery of services. Recently, authoritative bodies, particularly in the public sector, have mandated various sectors to collaborate. This case study used semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions to explore the experiences of representatives of the partnership management committees of one such collaborative strategy, the Student Health Initiative (SHI).

Research Question:

What are the experiences in collaborative processes of individuals who have been mandated to collaborate at the SHI regional partnership level, and what are their perceptions of the barriers and facilitators of this mandated collaboration?

Results:

Findings strongly support that mandated collaboration was experienced as an opportunity rather than an imposition. Participants recognized the service need for children and described the mandate as a way to bypass some of the barriers to collaboration, such as not having the right people to participate and a lack of financial support. Overall, the ongoing partnership dynamics of mandated collaborations did not differ greatly from the dynamics of non-mandated collaborations with respect to barriers and facilitators, but seemed to play a much stronger role in the initial development of these partnerships by providing concrete timelines, stated expectations, reporting mechanisms, and a pool of dollars to deliver student health services.

Mandated partnerships seemed to move at an accelerated pace through the commonly experienced turf wars and organizational misunderstandings that can occur whenever more than one sector gets together to collaborate. The results of this study suggest that being mandated in itself was a facilitator to collaboration, particularly when other facilitators of effective collaboration were already present. It could also be suggested that when there is a gap or need in service that is cross-sector in nature, mandated collaboration should be considered to ensure that the gap or need is not just identified as a provincial priority but is established as a priority for all sectors and regions that have a stake in filling the gap.

As governments continue to support intersectoral, interdisciplinary collaboration, and increasingly mandate organizations and sectors to collaborate, information on the barriers and facilitators of this type of collaboration will be integral to achieving successful outcomes.