Strategies for Developing Sustainable Academic-clinical Partnerships

Developing sustainable partnerships between academic and clinical settings is a central goal for achieving the aims of the Nexus. More commonly, academic, and clinical participants work on short-term achievable goals and hope for the best for maintaining and sustaining the momentum required for partnership. This seminar provides practical tools and strategies for creating foundations for sustainable partnerships.

The objectives of this seminar are for participants to:

1. Experiment with tools to develop shared mental models across settings.
2. Outline the key steps in the path to sustainable partnerships.
3. Identify potential obstacles to sustainability and strategies to address them.

The activities in this seminar are based on lessons from a current grant involving a large academic institution and major not-for-profit health system. A major aim of the grant is to develop a sustainable infrastructure and relationships to support the growth of interprofessional education, practice, and research. Participants in the seminar will experience several of the strategies being used by the cross-organizational grant team to build vision and consensus on optimal outcomes and how to achieve them.

The outline for the seminar is:

• Introduction to the seminar (10 minutes)
• Review of Goals
• Highlights of grant contributing to seminar activities
• Survey of Audience Experience
• Polling activity, e.g. how many are engaged in developing academic-clinical partnerships
• Creating a common vision (15 minutes)
• Shared mental model activity in small groups
• Reflective exercise on experience of developing a common model
• The Path to Sustainable Partnership
• Journey mapping exercise
• Expected bumps
• Minimizing and going around the bumps

Participants will engage in the process of shared mental modeling from team science. They will engage in small group reflective exercises about their experience of negotiating vision and goals. Following this exercise, they will use tools from design thinking, such as journey maps, to anticipate the stages and steps to creating sustainable partnerships. They will identify what they consider core elements of partnerships, the sequence in which they expect them to evolve, and potential indicators for success. As part of this mapping process, they will work with other participants to identify obstacles on the path to sustainable partnerships and propose how they will minimize or circumvent them.

As a result of participating in this 60-minute seminar, participants will engage with a set of tools and activities they can use to launch or augment their own partnership initiatives.