The role of social capital in primary care reforms

Reforms in several health systems of advanced countries have redesigned primary care in the last decades. The literature has assessed the effect of a variety of interventions and individual factors on the behavior of general practitioners (GPs). However, there is a lack of investigation concerning the influence of the resources embedded in the relationships of GPs personal advice networks (i.e., social capital) on GPs’ capacity of accomplishing defined objectives. The present study has two goals: (a) to assess the social capital inherent in the personal advice relationships of GPs; (b) to test the influence of social capital on GPs performance. The data collection relied on administrative data provided by an Italian local health authority (LHA) and a survey administered to the GPs of the LHA. The GPs personal advice networks were assessed through an ad-hoc instrument and interpreted as egocentric networks. We performed multivariate regression analyses on two different performance measures. Results show th...