A Roadmap to Develop Sharing Initiatives in Public Health: Expedited Version

Resource Summary

The Center for Sharing Public Health Services (“Center”) has created a Roadmap to help guide public health departments interested in sharing resources with other health departments or organizations. Sharing resources allows communities to solve problems that cannot be solved — or easily solved — by single organizations. This practice can increase effectiveness (enhancing the quality of existing services or increasing capacity) and efficiency (maximizing the value of each dollar invested in delivering public health services). It can also be a powerful tool to advance health equity and improve the access to and delivery of public health services in the community.

This document is a variation of the full Roadmap. It allows users to do a fast assessment of their existing sharing agreements or new agreements being considered. This Expedited Version can be helpful under certain circumstances, such as:

1. During an emergency situation (e.g., large outbreak or other immediate public health threat) when time just does not allow all the steps of the full Roadmap to be covered.
2. When the sharing agreement in question is narrow in scope or brief in duration.
3. When users know that they need to work on a narrow aspect of a sharing agreement and have no interest in covering other details in the full Roadmap.

Even under these conditions, the Center urges some caution. Users are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the full Roadmap, even though they may decide to use this expedited version instead. In addition, an expedited process may skip steps that could be important for the users, which may lead to undesirable results. The full version contains more details on the steps that are necessary to assure a successful implementation of a sharing agreement than the expedited version and should always be given preference, whenever possible. For those reasons it is always recommended that whenever possible the full Roadmap be used as a reference to support resource sharing. It is also advisable that if the circumstances that prompted the use of this Expedited Version change (e.g., the emergency sharing arrangement becomes a long-term effort, or the scope of the arrangement becomes broader), the team switch to the full version of the document.

CAUTION

  1. Before using the expedited version, familiarize yourself with the full version.
  2. Only use the expedited Roadmap when you meet one of the criteria listed here.
  3. Go back to the full Roadmap as soon as possible after the circumstances that prompted the use of the expedited version change.