Journal of Education and Health Promotion

Collaboration between the government and nongovernmental organizations in providing health‑care services: A systematic review of challenges

Authors

. Mohanna Rajabi
. Parvin Ebrahimi
. Aidin Aryankhesal
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Given the expanding range of health influencing factors, increasing expectations from
the health systems, and general challenges such as insufficient resources, the health services needed
by people cannot be provided completely by the governments alone. Therefore, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs)‑government collaboration is considered a common approach in health‑care
provision for different communities. Since the NGO‑government collaboration is complicated and
usually influenced by many challenges and issues, the present study was conducted to identify
collaboration challenges between the government and NGOs in providing health‑care services.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Using a systematic review method and searching in ISI Web of
Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Embase databases, using related keyword/terms, between March
2020 and June 2020, studies on NGO‑government collaboration in the health area were collected
without time limitation. After completing the article selection process, those articles that consistent
with the research purpose were chosen for the final analysis.
RESULTS: From 4236 initially collected studies, 16 studies were chosen for the final analysis. Based
on the content analysis of the selected articles, 70 challenges were identified in the NGO‑government
collaboration to provide health‑care services. These challenges were divided into five main themes:
structural issues, process issues, issues related to roles and responsibilities, trust and communications
issues, and control and power relation issues and 11 subthemes.
CONCLUSION: The present study provides significant challenges by NGO‑government collaboration
in providing health‑care services. Awareness of these challenges plays an important role in promoting
such collaborations and enables these organizations to highly exploit the strengths of each other,
resulting in a collaboration with win–win situation.

Keywords

Challenge
government
health system
intersectoral collaboration
nongovernmental organization
public–private partnership
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Journal of Education and Health Promotion
Volume 11, Issue 5
June 2021
Pages 1-9

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