Vital lessons from struggling partnerships and potential partnerships: an international study with leaders across the health sector.

Background: Inter-organizational partnerships and collaborations, used here interchangeably, have growing prominence across the health sector. Successful partnerships have received extensive study. However, especially for partnerships including nonprofit partners, limited attention has been given to negative factors that contribute to struggling partnerships, including failed partnerships, and/or impede potential partnerships, including unexplored and undeveloped potential partnerships. This study aimed to explore these across diverse examples of struggling and potential partnerships considered otherwise worthwhile in principle, according to leaders and managers-in 13 countries across Asia-Pacific, EU+, North America-from diverse roles and settings across the health sector. It also aimed to explore success factors they said contributed to successful partnerships.

Methods: Interviews were conducted with 70 practitioners in 13 countries and a wide range of roles and nonprofit, industry, and government settings, including research institutions, across the health sector. Interviews covered their examples of struggling, potential, and successful partnerships; and, factors. Interview data were analyzed inductively, employing thematic network analysis. Comments underlying themes were reviewed regarding the participants concerned to note range (e.g., regions).

Results: Key findings included: (1) the many negative factors and success factors identified as themes; (2) their occurrence across diverse contexts, including different regions and institutional sectors (i.e., nonprofit, industry, government); (3) the complementarity of negative factors and success factors, with each set placing different emphasis on certain topics and negative factors both broadening the overall range of topics and contributing more to literature; (4) the occurrence of most negative factors with both struggling and potential partnerships. The 255 partnerships and potential partnerships discussed included nonprofit (190/255), industry (112/255), and/or government (140/255) partners. Many spanned two different institutional sectors (147/255); 86/255 spanned one; 20/255 spanned three.

Conclusions: The findings suggest three takeaways for practitioners: (1) factors used to consider partnerships should reflect factors from struggling partnerships and/or potential partnerships, plus successful partnerships; (2) negative factors can highlight opportunities to advance partnerships, individually and systematically; (3) practitioners should consider developing frameworks of factors from literature and experience to facilitate judicious consideration of partnerships and inform approaches, lessons drawn, and potential partnerships sought. Struggling and potential partnerships merit scholarly attention.