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Trusting Relationship Case Study
This is a case that demonstrates how trusting and inclusive relationships can have a significant impact on the success of a collaboration.
This particular collaboration involved most of the primary care practices in one mixed urban rural setting and the public health organization serving it.
The goals of the collaborative initiative between public health and primary care were to increase immunization rates and efficiencies in reporting of immunizations. Also, it aimed to improve the management of vaccines with (more efficient provision of vaccines to clinics) to reduce wastage of vaccine, which is very costly.
The primary care and public health leadership decided to work together on the Exchange of Information and Resources pertaining to vaccines and immunization records. Public health staff from the communicable disease program also became involved.
The success of this Vaccine Management and Information and Resources Exchange was due in large part to the trusting and inclusive relationships in this collaboration. Many factors were involved:
- partners in this collaboration had strong past trusting relationships
- the community was small and many individuals in the collaboration had previous positive working relationships
- so, the front line staff from both organizations had positive relationships with each other and saw many opportunities to solve the problem
Despite the perceived “enforcement role” of public health that was held by primary care staff in the past related to inspections of cold chain breaks and school suspensions public health nurses built strong relationships with primary care providers to overcome past adversarial feelings.
Clients directly benefitted from the collaboration given the improved vaccine management program and reporting of immunization of children less than 18 years of age to the Ministry
Consequently, this led to reduced school suspensions due to more complete immunization records for each child and less costs in the province for wasted vaccines. In addition, there were less angry parents coming to their primary care offices because the parents no longer received suspension notices
Relationship building takes the investment of time and effort but it is worth it.