Saskatchewan Pharmacists Break New Ground in Canada with First Minor Ailment Assessment Fee
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Saskatchewan has become the first province in Canada to compensate pharmacists for prescribing medications for treatment of patients' minor ailments. The Pharmacists' Association of Saskatchewan (PAS) recently announced it had successfully negotiated a minor ailment assessment fee under the province's drug benefit plan. The fee, which took effect February 1, 2012, provides pharmacists with $18 when they assess approved “minor ailment conditions” that result in a drug prescription. Pharmacists in the province were given authority to prescribe for minor ailments in March 2011, as part of a broader expansion in their scope of practice. Currently, the approved ailments are acne, insect bites and cold sores, with PAS continuing discussions with the government on adding more approved conditions to the list. At least 50% of Saskatchewan pharmacists have taken the mandatory Minor Ailments Prescribing training, to allow them to offer the services to their patients.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.079 | 0.009 |
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".