A social network analysis of healthcare professional relationships in a French hospital

This paper aims to describe relationships among healthcare professionals in a French public hospital using social network analysis (SNA) and to improve health service quality by strengthening health service management and leadership.

This study was based on a questionnaire sent to randomly selected French public hospital professionals and administrators. Network composition measures were obtained using a name generator. Analysis focused on three main indicators: “centrality”, “prestige”, and “clique participants”. The SNA was carried out using UCINET^® and statistical analyses were performed with SPSS version 15.0.

A total of 104 questionnaires were returned and analysed. Centrality, prestige and clique indicators were highly correlated (all p‐value were less than 0.01). Physicians had the highest scores for the three indicators. Older age (≥45 years) was associated with higher centrality and clique numbers scores. Transversal activity was associated with higher scores than other specific activities (hospitalisation, ambulatory care), except for emergency care.

The paper shows how networks and SNA techniques provide novel and useful means to understand communication and collaboration between hospital professionals.