What do senior management staff members consider to be “interagency collaboration”? From the perspectives of these individuals, an exploration of the context and extent of enablers and barriers to interagency collaboration within their organisations

Abstract

Introduction: The Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) integrated care initiative, Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN), provides long term care coordination to vulnerable families. The spectrum of care required to optimise the health and social care outcomes for these families well exceeds the capacity of the public healthcare system alone. The HHAN clinicians recognise that needs such as housing, finance, and social supports often preclude these families from addressing physical and mental health issues and as such, work directly with clients to coordinate holistic interagency collaboration to suit each family’s needs. As part of the evaluation of HHAN, this project looks to understand how these endeavours on the “front line” align with the strategic directions of agencies across the network. Theory/Methods: The perspectives as well as the power to influence interagency collaboration will depend in part on an individual’s formal role within an organisation. Using a semi-structured, qualitative interview approach, this aspect of the HHAN evaluation will specifically focus on senior management staff from 12 separate organisations, all of which are networked with the HHAN program in some capacity. The interviews will focus on exploring the participant’s individual definition of “interagency collaboration”, followed by exploring their opinion on context and extent of enablers and barriers to interagency collaboration. Results: Interviews are expected to commence in early September, 2017. Preliminary findings will be presented. We will compare the definitions held by senior level management staff in different organisations and focus on what they believe to be enablers and barriers to interagency collaboration. Discussions: The project will discuss how the definition of interagency collaboration manifests as/or translates to barriers or enablers to engagement and cooperation in practice. Conclusions: We believe perspectives of and definitions held by senior management staff are influenced by their position within an organisation and their formal role which in turn affects interagency collaboration on multiple levels. This study will provide further insights into this concept.