Saskatchewan pharmacists pleased with demand for prescribing services, but seek to expand assessments for minor ailments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The numbers are in for the first 6 months of pharmacist prescribing services in Saskatchewan, and they show strong uptake of “level-1” services — including renewals, changes to dosage form and provision of emergency supplies of medications. About 48,000 Saskatchewan residents accessed these types of prescribing services between January 1 and June 30, 2012, according to figures released by the province’s health ministry on October 23. The numbers are much smaller, however, for minor ailments prescribing, accessed by approximately 550 people from February 1 to June 30. Reimbursements to pharmacists in the minor ailments category cost the government $10,000 over the 5-month period. “It wasn’t a surprise that the numbers were somewhat low on the minor ailments side,” says Dawn Martin, executive director of the Pharmacists’ Association of Saskatchewan (PAS). “This is still a very new program and the minor conditions included in the authority remain quite limited.” The statistics also reflect the fact that pharmacists receive the $18 minor ailment assessment fee only when the assessment results in a prescription. “The billing statistics don’t tell us about the cases where the pharmacist ends up providing the patient with an OTC medication or referring them to a physician,” says Ms. Martin. Meanwhile, PAS is pleased that Saskatchewan residents are turning to their pharmacists for prescription refills and similar services, says the executive director. “We have a diverse rural and remote population and pharmacists had struggled to help their patients in communities with small numbers of physicians. It appears we are indeed filling some gaps in patient care with these new services.” A survey conducted for PAS last summer showed that 95% of people in the province felt comfortable approaching their pharmacist to discuss health issues.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.148 | 0.031 |
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".