Evaluating adaptive local partnerships for social and health service integration: developing a program logic for local Health Justice Partnerships in New South Wales, Australia

Introduction: Health Justice Partnerships (HJPs) are local collaborations between legal assistance, health, and social care organisations. They seek to meet the legal needs of clients who would otherwise not seek legal assistance, and to provide timely intervention in legal issues. Because each partnership is localised, HJPs serve different populations in different service arrangements. A challenge for HJPs is to develop a robust evidence base to support their development, which requires evaluation of HJPs’ impact individually and collectively. This presentation describes a program logic that was developed with HJPs in New South Wales (NSW), as an initial step towards examining their impact and effectiveness in the Australian context.

Policy context and objective: HJPs in NSW have evolved at the local level, and each local partnership between services is governed through individual memoranda of understanding. Clients’ legal needs and organisational arrangements vary between individual HJPs.

Targeted population: Vulnerable people experiencing complex, interrelated, and compounding legal and health problems.

Highlights: A program logic that was developed, based on a series of workshops that were undertaken with representatives of NSW HJPs. It sets out sets out the principles that underpin HJPs’ operation, assumptions, inputs, activities, outcomes and impacts. It differentiates outcomes for clients, workers, partnerships, and for the justice and health systems. 

Comments on transferability: This program logic provides a starting point for planning and evaluating local partnerships that integrate health and social care. By describing key components of multi-site partnerships with a focus on integration, the program logic develops a shared terminology.

Conclusions: A tension in evaluating disparate but related initiatives is accurately describing their activities, and how these individually and collectively contribute to change.

Further work: is required to test and adapt the logic, and to use it to develop more robust evaluation, monitoring and performance frameworks.