The Stages of Building Public-private Partnerships in Public Health: Factors Influencing the Engagement Process in the Context of Healthy Eating in Restaurants in Ontario

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in public health are powerful tools to promote collaboration among organizations that cannot achieve their specific goals alone. Although there are frameworks that explain important aspects of multisectoral partnerships, they lack detailed descriptions of the stages and related factors to enable organizations progress along the path of PPP development, particularly in relation to obesity prevention or diet-related chronic diseases.This dissertation focuses on advancing the knowledge and understanding of factors that influence the process of building PPPs in public health, using healthy eating in restaurants in Ontario as the context for the study. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods research design was used to survey high-level representatives of organizations from the public and private sectors, non-governmental organizations and academia. Follow-up interviews were conducted to complement and expand the findings of previous survey, as well as to discover new perspectives from research participants.The integration of the findings, complemented by relevant literature, yielded the first theory-driven, empirically-based framework, which highlights 8 stages of building PPPs in public health: Awareness, Recognition, Contemplation, Dialogue, Negotiation, Deliberation, Engagement Decision, and Preparation. The Framework is a transparent tool that details the expected stages involved in PPP development, and uncovers associated factors that could enable or hinder collaboration, while enabling organizations to discuss, negotiate, and eventually deliberate and prepare openly for the successful creation of PPPs in public health, and possibly beyond.Ph.D