Maintaining Partnership Working
Take care of your team. Eradicating mental health stigma and discrimination can take a long time!
When developing partnerships and teams it is important to keep them alive. Often partnerships will get off to a big start but without care and attention can fade away. Eradicating stigma and discrimination will take a long time. The following points are helpful in keeping your partnerships alive:
- Have a co-ordinator, who keeps in touch with other members and keeps the diary.
- Keep people informed.
- Get together at agreed intervals.
Plan your meetings very carefully:
- Think about place and time of meetings.
- Think about venue and how accessible it is.
- Think about paying services user and carers expenses.
- Think about language used, avoid jargon and acronyms.
- Think about keeping the agenda interesting.
Think about having an action plan:
- Make sure it is realistic and paced.
- Build on activities that are already happening.
- Identify resources for your actions.
- Evaluate your activities – people like to know they are making a difference.
- Look after each other.
- Celebrate your achievements.