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Partnership working is critical to delivery across the public sector but can often feel frustrating and ineffectual for those involved. This article focuses on four areas crucial for effective partnership working: ensuring that there is a clear justification for the partnership; involving service users and communities in ways that are empowering and sustainable; developing good governance arrangements; and developing effective performance management arrangements. Throughout the article, the contrasting experiences of crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs) and youth offending teams (YOTs) are used to illustrate key points.

Partnership working in care homes for older people does happen, but the nature of this approach to improving the care provided in care homes has not been well articulated. Drawing on the experiences of participants (researchers, relatives and care home managers) from three projects the benefits and challenges of partnership working in this care setting are discussed. The benefits of working in partnership extended beyond the specific remit for each project, through the development of closer relationships between people in the care home. The challenges of partnership working derived largely from the process of learning to work together and the practicalities of finding time to invest in projects beyond the normal care demands. Requirements for successful partnership working were identified and included a need for time, a core group of committed participants and preliminary groundwork.

In 2007, Birmingham City University (formerly the University of Central England) and the West Midlands NHS Strategic Health Authority developed and implemented the LEAP (Leadership, Education and Partnership) project. The project extended and developed further a successful leadership development programme, which had run in the West Midlands for healthcare educators working in both higher education (HE) and NHS organisations.The LEAP project aimed to develop genuine partnership and collaborative working among health and social care education providers from a range of HE and NHS organisations in the West Midlands. This paper describes the leadership programme approaches and activities, the underpinning leadership and management theories and concepts, and the way in which these were woven together in the leadership development programme. Examples of some of the theoretical models and frameworks used in the programme, and reflections on how these helped to develop participants' knowledge, skills and approaches to collaboration and partnership working are also detailed.

The implementation of the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) strategy requires partnership between NHS providers and custodial and community-based practitioners in the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). What this partnership looks like is dependent on the nature and resources of involved services. However, what it is meant to achieve – reduced reoffending, a more knowledgeable workforce, and a more engaged client group – is clearer. It is fundamental to the OPD strategy that these outcomes are delivered through partnership so as to minimise harmful transitions between services, and to effectively share the expertise required for the holistic case management of personality disordered (PD) offenders. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The implementation of the OPD strategy is ongoing, and data will be forthcoming in due course that will allow for the empirical test of the hypothesis that working together is better than working separately. However, with the emphasis on public protection and workforce development, some of the crucial partnership issues may remain less well understood or explored. This paper overviews the services in which the authors are involved, describing their initiation and operation.

The paper articulates how NHS/NOMS partnerships have been developed and experienced.

The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of principles for partnership work in relation to the OPD strategy.

This paper is intended to assist developing services to make the most of collaborative working across the PD pathway in England and Wales.

Successful development of health and social care partnerships is contingent on the contribution of all stakeholder groups to overcome the ‘wicked’ issues that beset the field. This article explores four key issues, identified by a network of diverse stakeholders as vital to the future of health and social care partnerships, and proposes ways in which individuals and organisations from all stakeholder groups can support health and social care organisations to work together to deliver good outcomes to service users and their carers.

This paper reviews the growth in partnership working in public services and the associated demand for new forms of leadership in the public sector which respond to the different and more complex relationships within UK public services. These new demands require public sector managers to develop new skills for managing across organisational boundaries and in environments with multiple social goals and multiple stakeholders. The paper moves on to review the development of a new leadership questionnaire, which aims to help leaders reflect on their own leadership style and how they can strengthen their leadership within these emerging partnership settings.

This article examines the effectiveness of the multi‐agency approach in adult protection and draws on findings from research that examined the effectiveness of both partnership working and perceptions of the regulatory framework to protect vulnerable adults. The research findings were collected through the use of a survey of all local councils with social services responsibilities in England and Wales. Examples of good practice in partnership working were found. However, resource pressures, insufficient information sharing and a lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities were reported to hinder a multi‐agency approach.

Recent government policies in relation to children stress the importance of service integration and partnership working, with particular emphasis on combating social exclusion. With reference to findings from a three‐year empirical study, this article examines some key elements of the process of multi‐agency working in services for disabled children with complex health care needs. It highlights some of the barriers to effective partnerships and lists some pointers for policy and practice.

The personalisation agenda currently appears as a key strand of the Government's approach to health and social care services. On the face of it this offers an exciting new future where service users drive the way services are joined up, which for some may be welcome given the paucity of evidence to show that the organisationally‐driven partnership working of the past decade has delivered real and tangible outcomes for service users. There is some suggestion that in the future any talk about partnerships will be about this citizen‐state interaction, rather than one between health and social care agencies. This paper argues that there is a real danger in suggesting that personalisation negates the need for health and social care agencies to work together in partnership; instead this interface is more imperative than ever. In this paper we provide an overview of the debates around personalisation and partnership and set out the case why partnership should not be forgotten, and indeed will be key, in the success of the personalisation agenda.

The numbers of psychologists employed in HM Prison Service have doubled in the past three years to over 600 staff. HM Prison Service is the largest single employer of applied psychologists. With a governmental focus firmly on ‘joined up’ services in the criminal justice field (Boateng, 1999), the launch of the National Probation Service (NPS) in April 2001 has set the scene for closer partnership working between the two organisations. There has not historically been a national structure for the employment of psychologists in the probation service. With the creation of the NPS and an increased emphasis on partnership working, a national integrated role for psychologists is ripe for development. This presents both organisations with some significant partnership challenges and opportunities (Towl, 2000).