Little is currently known about public health partnerships, despite the fact that collaborative working is a key competency of public health practice and partnerships are still high on the policy agenda. This book draws on primary research reviewing public health partnerships, as well as on other research on partnership working more broadly. Our purpose is to establish how successful partnerships are in contributing to improved health and well-being outcomes. It is an under-explored topic in the academic literature and our intention in writing this book is to add to the evidence base while also explaining why it is difficult in practice to estalish with much certainty the impact of partnerships on outcomes.

As Dickinson and Glasby (2010, pp 813–14) note in regard to health and social care partnerships: ‘over time, a series of reviews of the partnership literature all conclude that the vast majority of research to date has focused on issues of process, not on outcomes’. It is a conclusion previously reached some years earlier by Dowling et al (2004) in their literature review of partnerships. In addition to the focus on public health partnerships and their impact on health outcomes, the book also focuses on the significance of partnerships in a policy and practice context and how partnerships have evolved to tackle key public health issues. It includes commentary and analysis on the Coalition government's extensive changes in public health introduced in April 2013, which form part of a wider programme of change affecting the National Health Service (NHS) and other public services.

Partnership working has become central to British public policy, notably since the late 1990s. Its appeal lies in the fact that few challenges facing government at both national and local levels fall neatly within the confines of a single department or organisation. This is especially true of the majority of challenges facing public health, which are cross-cutting in nature and involve several policy arenas, organisations and professional groups (Hunter et al, 2010). Partnership working is neither a new nor a recent phenomenon, but it has become more pervasive in recent years. At the same time, failures in public policy are invariably laid at the door of ineffective or malfunctioning partnerships. Paradoxically, the more important partnership working has become as a mechanism for ameliorating or solving complex problems, the less effective it appears to be.