| Abstract: |
The rationale for addressing the issue of social networks and social network
analysis in the context of health policy is to investigate the extent to which
these theoretical and analytical paradigms represent feasible and useful tools
to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies aimed at increasing the likelihood
that policy makers will use evidence from research in formulating health and
health services policy. In this context, the investigation of social network
theory and analysis is informed by the needs of the Sax Institute, which is a
coalition of University and research groups undertaking public health and
health services research in NSW. The aim of the Institute is to build
partnerships between researchers and health policy and service delivery
agencies and, through these partnerships, develop research assets and programs
and support researchers to enable and strengthen policy and practice focused
research. Although the final outcome of interest is the formulation of
evidence-informed policy (and, by inference, its implementation and the
subsequent improvement in outcomes such as enhanced health services delivery
and/or improved health status of those affected by the policy), it is unlikely
that a direct link between the research evidence used, the formulation of
policy, its implementation and any outcomes will be able to be observed within
the limited resources available to the Sax Institute. Therefore, for the
purposes of this paper, policy formulation and implementation will be treated
as processes, and their link to health services and patient/population health
status will be assumed. The paper will focus on the use of social networks in
encouraging or enhancing links between the research evidence and policy
formulation aspects of the process and the feasibility of using social network
analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of such links. In particular, the issue
of researcher-policy maker interaction will be dealt with, in terms of the
extent to which a social network is likely to encourage such interactions and
the extent to which interactions, in turn, facilitate the development of
evidence-informed policy. The paper is structured as followsa: social networks
and social network analysis are described in section 2, including a brief
explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the constructs. Section 3
covers some literature describing how networks have been used to link
researchers and policy makers (research policy networks) and any evaluations
of such networks. Section 4 will repeat this exercise with examples from the
literature of health research policy networks (or similar) and will focus on
the extent to which networks are likely to be effective in the context of
policy relating to health and health services, and, if they are, what might be
the characteristics required for a network to be successful. In turn, this
will allow some consideration of how the effectiveness of a network could be
evaluated. The final section (section 5) will draw some conclusions from the
preceding sections and raise some issues for the Sax Institute to consider. |