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Aligning Health Care and Social Services: Recommendations for Effective Engagement
Brief

Aligning Health Care and Social Services: Recommendations for Effective Engagement

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This brief outlines key findings and recommendations for establishing a more productive and rewarding relationship between the health care and social services sectors.

Based on research compiled for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation by Jean Flatley McGuire, PhD, a nationally known researcher at Northeastern University, the brief explores the beneficial outcomes that increased engagement between the health care and social services sectors could have for achieving a strong Culture of Health.

Cross-sector collaborations facilitate critical pathways for addressing social determinants of health and improving the health of populations. A future alignment between the health care and social services sectors will benefit patients and providers alike, and may achieve efficiencies in both sectors. However, that alignment will not be successful if the social services sector lacks the resources to adequately meet its foundational social, economic, and independent living support roles that build well-being, self-sufficiency, and community engagement. Health care needs a strong social services sector that can both diminish risk through these core functions and reliably respond when health care-related non-medical service delivery or coordination is needed to achieve quality and cost improvements.

Both sectors require significant relational, cultural, partnership, capacity development, and workflow changes and a commitment to adequate planning, collaborative goal setting, intervention piloting, and course correction.

Components of Alignment

Financing Icon Financing
Governance Icon Governance

Author Organization

Northeastern University

Publication Date

08.2019

Topic Area

Alignment 101
Health Care
Social Needs
Webinar

Aligning in Crisis: Strategies and Tools to Leverage Federal Funding

On 9/14, experts from Aligning in Crisis, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will discussed how, if deployed strategically and effectively, federal funds can advance equity, shift power to the community, and set the stage for positive, long-term change.

Brief

Intermediary Organizations Are Urgently Needed to Assist in Modernizing Public Health and Addressing the Drivers of Health in the United States

This issue brief describes the different roles intermediaries can play; provides examples of where they have been used in practice; and identifies the risks, benefits, and possible innovations of intermediaries as well as policy approaches that might facilitate their appropriate use.

Publication

Revising the Foundational Public Health Services in 2022

This publication provides a framework outlining the unique responsibilities of governmental public health and can be used to explain the vital role of governmental public health in a thriving community; identify capacity and resource gaps; determine the cost for assuring foundational activities; and justify funding needs

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