Awareness and Use of the Rapid Palliative Radiotherapy Program by Family Physicians in Eastern Ontario: A Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ottawa Rapid Palliative Radiotherapy Program (RPRP) was established in 1999 with the goal of facilitating access by family physicians to radiotherapy services for patients with advanced symptomatic cancer. Two years later, an audit revealed that of the 148 patients treated by the program, only 19 had been referred by family physicians.We therefore assessed awareness of the RPRP and perceptions of the effectiveness of palliative radiotherapy on the part of family physicians by surveying a random sample of family physicians in Eastern Ontario.Response rate was 50%. Only 18% of family physicians were aware of the RPRP, although 56% had previously referred patients for palliative radiotherapy. Among responders, 80% regularly provided palliative care, and these physicians were much more likely to be aware of and to refer patients for palliative radiotherapy.Our survey confirms the key role that family physicians play in providing care to patients with advanced cancer. However, significant deficits in family physician awareness of palliative radiotherapy programs and in knowledge of the effectiveness of palliative radiotherapy should be addressed to improve patient care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".