Networks around internships in healthcare

One of the key ways to tackle staff shortages is education, which requires collaboration between organisations. As internships are crucial in vocational training, educational and internship institutes need to agree on the terms of internships. The aim of this study is to answer the research question: What would be a successful way of arranging networks to create internships in the healthcare sector? Initial conditions, governance and reciprocal behaviour are key factors in the various stages of collaboration and are likely to leave their mark on the outcome. A comparison of networks in four regions in the Netherlands provides insight into how such networks are organised. We conducted structured interviews with key figures and analysed documents and open-source data. We conclude that regions differ in how they organise healthcare internships; some are very network-oriented, others to a lesser degree. Although all regions manage to arrange one internship per student, network-oriented regions seem to create better matches.