Analysis of Complaints to a Tertiary Care Pain Clinic Over a Nine‐Year Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The present study is the result of an internal audit and examines the profiles of complainants and the sources and nature of complaints toward the staff in a tertiary care pain clinic, the Comprehensive Pain Program of the Toronto Western Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. METHODS: All sources of complaints over a nine-year period were reviewed, which included the following: Toronto Western Hospital Patient Relations (PR) records, with a subset of the files qualitatively analyzed in depth regarding the nature of complaints and complainants; complaints that bypassed PR and were addressed directly to the program director against members of the staff; complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario; and complaints recorded anonymously at rateMDs.com. RESULTS: Although the prevalence of PR complaints was very low (1.73 complaints per 1000 visits), several other sources of complaints were identified. The typical complainant was a Canadian-born woman acting on her behalf or on behalf of a family member. More than one-half of the complaints were directed against the physicians regarding their opinion of psychological factors augmenting the patient's presentation and/or inappropriate use of opioids. Defensive techniques instituted by the Comprehensive Pain Program staff in reaction to the complaints are discussed, and pertinent literature is reviewed. CONCLUSION: The present study is the first to examine the nature of complaints and complainants from a Canadian pain clinic. Further studies are needed to explore the complex issues of patient and staff interactions, and complaints in the era of 'patient-centred care'.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".