The current status of diabetes care, diabetic retinopathy screening and eye-care in British Columbia’s First Nations Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives. The objective of this study was to evaluate the current status of primary diabetes care, diabetic retinopathy screening, and eyecare for First Nations individuals with diabetes living on-reserve in British Columbia.Study Design. Prospective cross-sectional observational survey.Methods. A mail-out survey was sent to all BC First Nations Communities in the format of a 26-item questionnaire. A series of general questions were asked concerning community populations, regional transportation options and the availability of local healthcare providers. Specific questions about the frequency and source of eye and diabetic retinopathy care in each community were also solicited.Results. A sixty-seven percent questionnaire response rate was achieved (136/202 communities). The community-reported rate of diabetes mellitus ranged from 4.8 to 11.8% with an average of 6.4%. The proportion of on-reserve individuals with diabetes receiving yearly retinal examinations for diabetic retinopathy was found to be only 33%. Many communities received eye-care from more than one professional group, but the majority of basic eye-care and retinopathy screening was provided by optometrists. Ophthalmologists were less likely to provide eye-care for these communities; however, family physicians and nurses were frequently responsible for performing eye evaluations.Conclusions. The vast majority of First Nations people with diabetes who live on-reserve in British Columbia do not have access to annual examinations by an eye-care professional. Eye evaluations and retinal screening were often the responsibility of individuals with little formal training in this area.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".