Does accessibility to antiretroviral care improve after down-referral of patients from hospitals to health centres in rural South Africa?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We conducted an evaluation of healthcare accessibility among patients taking antiretroviral treatment (ART) after they were 'down-referred' from hospital-based programmes to primary healthcare (PHC) centres in a rural South African setting. A cross-sectional design was used to study 109 PHC users compared to a randomly selected control group of 220 hospital-based users. Both groups were matched for a minimum duration on ART of six months. Using a comprehensive healthcare-accessibility framework, the participants were asked about availability, affordability and acceptability of their ART care in structured exit interviews that were linked to their ART-clinic record reviews. Unadjusted and adjusted regression models were used. Down-referral was associated with reduced transportation and meal costs (p = 0.001) and travel time to an ART facility (p =0.043). The down-referred users were less likely to complain of long queues (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 0.06; 95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 0.01-0.29), were more likely to feel respected by health providers (AOR 4.43; 95% CI: 1.07-18.02), perceived lower stigma (AOR 0.25; 95% CI: 0.07-0.91), and showed a higher level of ART adherence (AOR 8.71; 95% CI: 1.16-65.22) than the hospital-based users. However, the down-referred users preferred to consult with doctors rather than nurses (AOR 3.43; 95% CI: 1.22-9.55) and they were more likely to visit private physicians (AOR 7.09; 95% CI: 3.86-13.04) and practice self-care (AOR 4.91; 95% CI: 2.37-10.17), resulting in increased health-related expenditure (p = 0.001). Therefore, the results indicate both gains and losses in ART care for the patients, and suggest that down-referred patients save time and money, feel more respected, perceive lower stigma and show better adherence levels. However, unintended consequences include increased costs of using private physicians and self-care, highlighting the need to further promote the potential gains of down-referral interventions in resource-poor settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".