RESOURCES: Review - Ways to avoid painful partnership headaches

The idea of joining up services is sensible and far from new. It has always suffered from an imbalance between plentiful good intentions and little hard evidence about what works well and why. How does the hard-pressed practitioner or manager meet the immediate challenges of partnership working? These include managing the performance of people in other agencies, sharing information, working across different organisational and professional cultures, setting up effective partnership structures and accounting to stakeholders with widely different reasons for being in the partnership.

This book from Russell House Publishing aims to offer "clues and suggestions about how you can develop your work inside partnerships". People working in partnerships need, above all else, exceptional clarity about what they have to offer partnerships and what they want from them. How will the investment in the partnerships lead to benefit for service users? Will it be a cost-effective investment? What practical and legal arrangements work best?