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Partnership working is critical to delivery across the public sector but can often feel frustrating and ineffectual for those involved. This article focuses on four areas crucial for effective partnership working: ensuring that there is a clear justification for the partnership; involving service users and communities in ways that are empowering and sustainable; developing good governance arrangements; and developing effective performance management arrangements. Throughout the article, the contrasting experiences of crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs) and youth offending teams (YOTs) are used to illustrate key points.

Successful development of health and social care partnerships is contingent on the contribution of all stakeholder groups to overcome the ‘wicked’ issues that beset the field. This article explores four key issues, identified by a network of diverse stakeholders as vital to the future of health and social care partnerships, and proposes ways in which individuals and organisations from all stakeholder groups can support health and social care organisations to work together to deliver good outcomes to service users and their carers.

This paper reviews the growth in partnership working in public services and the associated demand for new forms of leadership in the public sector which respond to the different and more complex relationships within UK public services. These new demands require public sector managers to develop new skills for managing across organisational boundaries and in environments with multiple social goals and multiple stakeholders. The paper moves on to review the development of a new leadership questionnaire, which aims to help leaders reflect on their own leadership style and how they can strengthen their leadership within these emerging partnership settings.

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when working in partnership be addressed?

A theoretical approach is taken, framing partnership as collaborative knowledge work between practitioners and clients. Concepts of relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency are explored as means to understand the forms of expertise involved in partnership. An empirical example is provided from practices guided by The Family Partnership Model, an approach that has been widely implemented.

These concepts help to address three key challenges experienced by practitioners: client readiness for change, maintaining focus and purpose and using specialist expertise in partnership. This approach elucidates features of partnership practice that distinguish it from expert-led models, while highlighting diverse forms of expertise in play.

The framework presented in this paper is distinctive and can be used to identify how practitioners can avoid common dilemmas, even in challenging circumstances with vulnerable families where practitioner-client relationships may be perceived as fragile. It counters the idea that partnership work dilutes professional expertise. Instead, an enriched and augmented view of professional expertise is presented.

Posits that collaboration in the UK is either recommended as good practice or enshrined within legislation as a necessity. Chronicles that there has been a sustained growth in the number of formal and informal collaborative relationships between state agencies and market, voluntary and community sectors, as well as within and between state agencies themselves. Uses illustrative case study materials drawn from the authors’ research and consultancy experiences, particularly in the areas of inner city community based mental health, urban regeneration, policing, and child and adolescent mental health. Concludes that research has extensively been drawn on to illustrate the dilemmas that regularly arise when attempting to implement this policy objective.

This paper aims to describe the context, process and findings of a qualitative review of Walsall Arts into Health Partnership, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most progressive community‐based arts and health programmes in the UK.

The research adopted a multi‐method qualitative approach to gathering data, using a combination of documentary analysis and semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with a range of stakeholders.

The findings highlight a number of emerging themes categorised under four broad headings: impact of the Arts into Health work on health and wellbeing of the people of Walsall; effectiveness; key characteristics; and future development of the Arts into Health Partnership.

The research findings point to the value of community arts and health work and to the importance of a partnership approach. However, current debates regarding evaluation approaches within the field point to the need for clarification regarding values, the use of multiple methodologies and engagement with a diversity of stakeholders.

This paper provides an overview of the local and national arts and health policy contexts within which the review took place – shortly before a major restructuring of the health service; outlines the research methodology; presents and discusses the key findings, outlines recommendations; and discusses subsequent action and the impact of the research.

The implementation of the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) strategy requires partnership between NHS providers and custodial and community-based practitioners in the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). What this partnership looks like is dependent on the nature and resources of involved services. However, what it is meant to achieve – reduced reoffending, a more knowledgeable workforce, and a more engaged client group – is clearer. It is fundamental to the OPD strategy that these outcomes are delivered through partnership so as to minimise harmful transitions between services, and to effectively share the expertise required for the holistic case management of personality disordered (PD) offenders. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The implementation of the OPD strategy is ongoing, and data will be forthcoming in due course that will allow for the empirical test of the hypothesis that working together is better than working separately. However, with the emphasis on public protection and workforce development, some of the crucial partnership issues may remain less well understood or explored. This paper overviews the services in which the authors are involved, describing their initiation and operation.

The paper articulates how NHS/NOMS partnerships have been developed and experienced.

The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of principles for partnership work in relation to the OPD strategy.

This paper is intended to assist developing services to make the most of collaborative working across the PD pathway in England and Wales.

The personalisation agenda currently appears as a key strand of the Government's approach to health and social care services. On the face of it this offers an exciting new future where service users drive the way services are joined up, which for some may be welcome given the paucity of evidence to show that the organisationally‐driven partnership working of the past decade has delivered real and tangible outcomes for service users. There is some suggestion that in the future any talk about partnerships will be about this citizen‐state interaction, rather than one between health and social care agencies. This paper argues that there is a real danger in suggesting that personalisation negates the need for health and social care agencies to work together in partnership; instead this interface is more imperative than ever. In this paper we provide an overview of the debates around personalisation and partnership and set out the case why partnership should not be forgotten, and indeed will be key, in the success of the personalisation agenda.

This article aims to explore public‐public partnership issues arising when public sector organisations work together in order to deliver a new government sponsored initiative.

A qualitative approach was adopted for this study, employing in‐depth interviews across four UK case study sites. The rich qualitative data gathered from these interviews is analysed utilising a thematic framework.

The findings indicate that most of the participants did not feel that they were involved in a partnership and had little or no contact with their partner. The key role of inter‐personal relationships amongst individual members is emphasised.

The findings presented represent the pilot sites utilised in a government sponsored initiative. As future public‐public partnerships develop, further research should be undertaken to explore this phenomenon and establish the generalisability of these findings.

The study indicates that while there are clear benefits of partnership working, achieving successful collaboration is not straightforward. Improvements need to be made to develop partnerships using both formal and informal communication methods.

This paper demonstrates the importance of the relationships between, and perceptions of, personnel at an individual level in the success of public‐public partnerships.

Partnership working in care homes for older people does happen, but the nature of this approach to improving the care provided in care homes has not been well articulated. Drawing on the experiences of participants (researchers, relatives and care home managers) from three projects the benefits and challenges of partnership working in this care setting are discussed. The benefits of working in partnership extended beyond the specific remit for each project, through the development of closer relationships between people in the care home. The challenges of partnership working derived largely from the process of learning to work together and the practicalities of finding time to invest in projects beyond the normal care demands. Requirements for successful partnership working were identified and included a need for time, a core group of committed participants and preliminary groundwork.