Volume 78 Number 2, 2000
The Governance and Management of Effective Community Health Partnerships: A Typology for Research, Policy, and Practice
Shannon M. Mitchell and Stephen M. Shortell
Community health partnerships (CHPs) are voluntary collaborations of diverse community organizations that have joined forces in order to pursue a shared interest in improving community health. Although these cross-sectoral collaborations represent a way to address social determinants of health and disease in society, they suffer from governance and management problems associated with interorganizational relationships in general and health care challenges specifically. A typology of effective governance and management characteristics provides a systematic, theoretically based way of addressing dimensions of governance and management and serves as a guide in constructing, maintaining, and measuring successful partnerships. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective for classifying important organizational issues, identifying barriers to successful development and sustainability, and facilitating the attainment of goals.
