Intersectoral collaboration at a decentralized level: information flows in child welfare and healthcare networks

Background As needs of families with social and behavioral health problems often exceed the expertise and possibilities of a single professional, service or organization, cross-service collaboration is indispensable to adequately meeting those needs. Despite the progressive focus on organizing integrated care, service fragmentation and service duplication remain persistent problems in child welfare and healthcare service delivery systems. A crucial factor to overcome these problems is information exchange between organizations. This study explores and compares the development over time of structures of information exchange in networks, concerning both material and knowledge-based information. Methods A comparative case study and social network analysis of three inter-organizational networks of child welfare and healthcare services in different-sized municipalities in the Netherlands. The research population consisted of organizations from various sectors participating in the networks. Data were collected at two moments in time with a mixed method: semi-structured interviews with network managers and an online questionnaire for all network members. Density and degree centralization were used to examine the information exchange structures. Ucinet was used to analyze the data, with use of the statistical tests: Compare Density Procedure and Quadratic Assignment Procedure. Results This study shows that different structures of information exchange can be distinguished, concerning both material and knowledge-based information. The overall connectedness of the studied structures of the networks are quite similar, but the way in which the involvement is structured turns out to be different between the networks. Over time, the overall connectedness of those structures appears to be stable, but the internal dynamics reveals a major change in relationships between organizations in the networks. Conclusions Our study yields empirical evidence for the existence of and the differences between structures and dynamics of both material and knowledge-based information exchange relationships. With a loss of more than a half of the relations in a year, the relationships between the organizations in the network are not very stable over time. The contrast between major internal dynamics and the stable overall connectedness is an important point of concern for network managers and public officials, since this impermanence of relations means that long-term integrated care cannot be guaranteed.