Mapping collaborative relations among Canada`s chronic disease

8th European Public Health Conference: Parallel Sessions
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Mapping collaborative relations among Canada’s
chronic disease prevention organizations
Damien Contandriopoulos
D Contandriopoulos1,2, N Hanusaik3, K Maximova4, G Paradis5,7,
JL O’Loughlin3,6,7
1
Faculté des sciences infirmières, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec,
Canada
2
Institut de Recherche en Santé Publique de l’Université de Montréal
(IRPSUM), Montréal, Québec, Canada
3
Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal
(CRCHUM), Montréal, Québec, Canada
4
School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
5
Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill
University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
6
Département de médecine sociale et préventive, Université de Montréal,
Montréal, Québec, Canada
7
Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), Montréal, Québec,
Canada
Contact: [email protected]
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European Journal of Public Health, Vol. 25, Supplement 3, 2015
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Objectives
There is converging evidence from the fields of sociology,
organizational science and management that organizations
gain an advantage from being embedded in a dense network of
collaborative relations. We used network analysis to map the
collaborations between organizations with a chronic disease
prevention mandate in Canada.
Approach
The data for this analysis were collected as part of the 2010
Public Health Organizational Capacity Study (PHORCAST)
census. PHORCAST is a repeat census of all public health
organizations engaged in primary chronic disease prevention
(CDP) at the regional, provincial, territorial and national levels
in Canada. Respondent organizations (n = 207) were asked to
use a name generator approach to list organizations with
which they had collaborations, resulting in the identification of
1,322 organizations linked through 2,815 collaborative relations. Optimized sociograms of the resulting collaborative
network were produced using structural network analysis
(Cytoscape 3.1.0 software).
Results
Of the 1,322 organizations identified, 1,038 (78%) are
interconnected in one single component which spans all
provinces and territories. We computed degree and betweenness centrality for all organizations comprising this main
component and analyzed mean provincial scores. The results
show that CDP organizations’ density and interconnectedness
are much higher in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Maritime
provinces. Interconnectedness was weakest in British
Columbia and Alberta. We also used two complementary
sociogram optimization algorithms to map out the structure of
the CDP network. Visual analysis of optimized sociograms
suggests that CDP organizations in Saskatchewan and those
with a federal or multi-province mandate are structurally
different from the Canadian average.
Conclusion
In this study we identified clusters of organizations that have
either a central position or a bridging function in the network
of collaborative relations. These results may provide important
clues about the link between provincial organizational capacity
for chronic disease prevention and population health
outcomes.
Key messages
Public health capacity should not be conceived as the sum of
discrete organization’s capacities but as a complex ecology
of organizations whose influence is shaped by the way they
are interconnected
The method we developped allows to draw an actual map of
organizational collaborations in the field of public health
interventions at the national level