Improving Approaches of Intersectoral Collaboration for Health by Health and Food Security High Council in I.R.Iran

Intersectoral Collaboration and Community Participation are two main strategies for sustaining equity in health. Based on the 4th 5years country development plan، Health and Food Security High Council (HC) as a strategy for developing intersectoral collaboration. Reviewing members'' opinions of HC may show the clear way of improving intersectoral collaboration for health promotion of the population to senior officials of Ministry of Health and Medical Education. This was a descriptive and qualitative study. Information were gathered by structured interview to HC members and content analysis of the documents and gray materials related to initiation and performance of the HC since it''s opening. Content analysis and adding up the interviews were done by hand after defining the main domains. Most of HC members believed that the HC effectiveness is very low or low. For the 1st step، defining health priorities and then responsibilities and expectations of each organization were proposed. Organizations necessity to introduce a sustained representative، creating taskforces for deep working on the issues، regular meeting in secretariat، concurrent information sharing to the members، strengthening similar structure in provinces and giving more authority to them and connecting the council to the scientific committees of health elites are main improvement approaches. There is gap between the performance of the HC and the law makers'' expectations. Implementing secretariat of HC including expertise and special working system of intersectoral collaboration will mostly cover the weakness. Defining periodical roles and expectations of organizations and capacity building of health collaborators of the ministries and organizations، and incentivizing organization which have effective contribution، will strengthen and continue the collaboration more.