A social network analysis on clinical education of diabetic foot

Identification of Educational Influentials (EIs) in clinical settings helps considerably to knowledge transfer among health and medical practice providers. The aim of this study was identifying EIs in diabetic foot ulcers (DFU) by medical students (clerks, interns and residents) and providing their relational pattern in this subject.

Subjects were medical students at clerk, intern and resident levels in a local educational hospital. A standard questionnaire with four domains (knowledge, communication, participation and professional ethics) was used for identifying EIs. Students introduced those people with these characteristics who referred them for DFU. Respective communication networks were drawn as intra-group (such as resident-resident) and inter-group (such as intern-resident) networks and quantitative criteria of density, in-degree and out-degree centrality and reciprocity were measured.

The network density of clerks-residents (0.024) and interns-residents (0.038) were higher than clerks-attends (0.015) and interns-attends (0.05); indicating that there were more consulting interactions in former networks than the latter. Degree centrality in residents-related networks (clerks-residents = 2.3; interns-residents = 2.6) were higher than attends-related ones (clerks-attends = 1.1; interns-attends = 1.7), while they were not statistically significant. However, In-degree centralization, which indicating a degree of variance of the whole network of ingoing relationships, in attends-related networks was greater than resident-related networks.

Resident were consulted with almost as same as attends on DFU. It showed that residents were playing a remarkable role in knowledge transfer and they can be considered as EIs in this clinical setting. It seemed that the availability was the main reason for this key role.