Understanding the social networks that contribute to diversion in hospital inpatient pharmacies: A social network analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Controlled substances (CS) are 'diverted' (stolen) from healthcare facilities via many integrated and diverse mechanisms due to a lack of safeguards. There remains a gap in understanding how healthcare workers (HCWs) leverage their social networks (e.g., their role/tasks and interactions with other roles/tasks) within the medication use process (MUP) that contribute to diversion. Social network analysis (SNA) is an analytic approach used to map and analyze social connections, which can help identify influential interdependence between HCWs and tasks susceptible to drug diversion. Objectives: To map the social network structures of MUP tasks vulnerable to CS diversion in two Inpatient pharmacies and compare diversion risks by identifying influential tasks and HCWs. Methods: This was an exploratory sequential mixed methods study conducted in the Inpatient pharmacies at two large hospitals in Toronto, Canada. Initial analysis used previously collected clinical observation data to identify key pharmacy roles and tasks vulnerable to CS diversion. Subsequently, a cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect demographic information on HCWs and assess their engagement in the identified vulnerable tasks. Clinical observations and survey data were used to perform two-mode SNA to identify connections between HCWs and tasks susceptible to drug diversion. Results: The analysis identified different network structures across both sites but highlighted the importance of strategic Pharmacist or Technician Supervisor oversight to moderate-high vulnerability tasks. Pharmacy technicians were found to be the network's most central actors, while Pharmacists had a more supportive role on the network's periphery, providing oversight. Across both sites, there was strong connectivity between HCWs and tasks, indicating a higher level of security against potential undetected diversion. Conclusion: By strategically involving Pharmacists or Technician Supervisors, diversion risk can be mitigated through cross-checking and quality control. Through identifying the network structure of each unit, hospitals can identify opportunities for future interventions to prevent diversion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".