Tackling alcohol-related harms crosses agency and professional boundaries, requiring collaboration between health, criminal justice, education and social welfare institutions. It is a key component of most multi-component programmes in the United States, Australia and Europe. Partnership working, already embedded in service delivery structures, is a core mechanism for delivery of the new UK Government Alcohol Strategy.
This article reports findings from a study of alcohol partnerships across England. The findings are based on a mix of open discussion interviews with key informants and on semi-structured telephone interviews with 90 professionals with roles in local alcohol partnerships.
Interviewees reported the challenges of working within a complex network of interlinked partnerships, often within hierarchies under an umbrella partnership, some of them having a formal duty of partnership. The new alcohol strategy has emerged at a time of extensive reorganisation within health, social care and criminal justice structures.
Further development of a partnership model for policy implementation would benefit from consideration of the incompatibility arising from required collaboration and from tensions between institutional and professional cultures. A clearer analysis of which aspects of partnership working provide ‘added value’ is needed.
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