Value of partnership for workplace health promotion : guideline for partnership building

This publication is an outcome of the project Workplace Health Promotion (WHP): National Health Policies and Strategies in an Enlarging Europe, carried out during 2005-2007. The guideline aims to offer ideas and ways to build partnerships by providing background for partnership building, a brief description of the situation of WHP in some European countries and examples of partnership building processes from different countries. The goal is also to provide new perspectives for developing partnerships between organizations, different service providers, and actors to improve health at work. The guideline provides information on the types of partnerships and the benefits and obstacles of partnership building processes and cites examples of partnership building in different European countries. It offers assistance in the following tasks: -forming a base for partnership creation process; -creating priorities for partnership building between different partners; -locating the partnership’s weaknesses, strengths, and issues for development between partners in WHP; -comparing different approaches of partners in different WHP developmental processes in workplaces; encouragement for basic evaluation and monitoring of partnerships in WHP. The WHP objectives and focuses of different workplaces may vary, wich means this guideline seeks to provide support in only the description and analysis of a partnership, not a complete picture of the processes leading to different partnership models