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The changing nature of organisations in the public sector means that collaboration is an imperative for many. However, we still know little about how collaborations operate in practice. Those stewarding collaborations need this knowledge to provide effective support. In this article, we are interested in applying Salignac et al.'s Collaboration Health Assessment Tool (CHAT) framework to a live collaboration initiative to better understand the factors, chain of events, and actions that lead to 'healthy' collaboration. We conducted interviews with stakeholders from a collaboration initiative involved in the implementation of an education participation program. Findings from our qualitative analysis suggest the initial design stage to be of critical importance. Ultimately, our research provides an example of how CHAT can be used to identify dimensions of collaboration that are, or are not, working well for an initiative and how partner organisations can use systems thinking to understand how their collaboration functions to better address the issues that they face. Collaboration remains central to achieving policy goals (such as whole of government initiatives through to service delivery). There, however, remains an imperative to gather and share evidence on what works (or not) to enhance collaborative practice. Applying the Collaboration Health Assessment Tool (CHAT) framework to a live collaboration initiative, we put forward three suggested actions aimed at practitioners and applied academics to improve collaboration health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]