Ontario doctors’ attitudes toward and use of clinical practice guidelines in oncology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Clinical practice guidelines are intended to improve patient care and outcomes. Controversy exists about the utility of guidelines and doctors' attitudes toward them. The purpose of the survey was to determine Ontario doctors' attitudes toward practice guidelines in general, awareness of, and attitudes about, Cancer Care Ontario's Practice Guideline Initiative and the evidence-based guidelines it produces, self-reported use of guidelines and, factors related to guideline use. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional, self-administered postal survey of 1034 Ontario doctors who treat cancer. Main outcome measures were attitudes toward practice guidelines in general, attitudes towards those developed by Cancer Care Ontario's Practice Guideline Initiative, and self-reported use of practice guidelines. FINDINGS: A total of 520 doctors responded producing a 57% survey response rate. Ontario doctors are quite positive about practice guidelines in general and those developed by Cancer Care Ontario. Forty-four per cent reported using guidelines routinely or most of the time. Positive attitudes towards guidelines in general and the Ontario cancer guidelines specifically were related to more frequent reported use of guidelines. Other factors related to frequent reported use of guidelines included being a medical oncologist, treating gynaecological cancers and not other types of cancers. INTERPRETATION: Ontario doctors have positive attitudes toward practice guidelines and report frequent use of them. By understanding the relationship between doctors' perceptions of specific guidelines and their subsequent adherence to them, guideline developers will be better positioned to produce quality evidence-based guidelines that doctors will find acceptable, and therefore, be more predisposed to use.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".