Lessons Learned

• Inclusion of the appropriate professional and non-professional skills to meet the human resources needed for programs, services, and the population being served is a supportive enabler;
• Capitalizing on public health and primary care knowledge and skills supports a collaboration;
• Leveraging staff members with different skill sets from other organizations augments and complements services: This assists a bi-sector collaboration to reach out to other sectors;
• Sectors can use partners to help build human resource capacity in their setting to better meet the needs of clients and populations;
• Staff members could be given the opportunity to fully apply their professional knowledge and skills and allowed to be flexible in their roles to meet the collaboration’s needs;
• It is helpful to manage human resource challenges with such problems as staff back up during vacations and shifting program priorities at times when human resources need to be deployed elsewhere. Examples of the latter include influenza campaigns, communicable disease outbreaks, and/or in the event of a disaster.