Discussion
Partnerships are fundamental to successful public health practice [4] Partnerships between academia and community organizations, such as with local health departments, can be viewed as critical elements of the system needed to improve a community’s quality of life and well-being.
These public health system partnerships hold the potential to address local public health concerns by engaging multiple stakeholders and accessing varied resources, such as funding, expertise, and infrastructure. Zahner states that ‘‘interorganizational collaboration aimed at community health improvement is an expectation of local public health systems’’ [13]. Furthermore, the IOM and the Council on Linkages between Academia and Public Health Practice
recommend that partnerships between academia and public health practice are essential to educating a public health workforce [14, 15]. Our work examined not only the extent to which partnerships between academia and LHDs were established in New England but we assessed what activities these collaborations are engaged in that contribute to public health education and public health workforce development, as well as what essential public health services their collaboration addressed.