The Institute of Public Health in Ireland (IPH) is committed to the development of strong multisectoral partnerships as a crucial step in tackling inequalities in health. This has become an important area of work for us, supporting a variety of local partnerships, mainly in Northern Ireland. 

An early part of this programme was the publication of a Partnership Framework: A Model for Partnerships for Health. This was developed from a story workshop in December 1999 and validated at the first all-island conference on partnerships for health in 2000.

Since then, the Institute has worked with a wide range of area-based and community partnerships introducing public health interventions locally. These include Health Action Zones (HAZs), Investing for Health (IfH) Partnerships and Healthy Living Centres (HLCs).

Areas of work have included food poverty and fuel poverty, as programmes to address these issues have been developed by partnerships. Much of our work has been concerned with evaluation of partnerships and their projects. In 2006, we completed a follow-up case study of North and West Belfast HAZ.

From 2003 to 2006, we carried out research into identifying and measuring the benefits of partnerships. This work was funded by the Research and Development Office of the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) in Northern Ireland as part of its New Targeting Social Need (TSN) programme. For further information on this report, see our sub-section Benefits of Partnerships.