Physical Activity Counseling and Prescription Among Canadian Primary Care Physicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Primary care physicians are ideally positioned to affect a large population at risk for epidemics of sedentary lifestyle; however, it is unclear what type of counseling they provide. METHODS: A questionnaire was used to obtain information on primary care physicians' behaviors with respect to counseling and prescribing physical activity, physician demographics, and practice characteristics. Registered primary care physicians in Canada were contacted in all 10 provinces and 2 territories. RESULTS: Of 27 980 primary care physicians, 14 319 returned usable questionnaires and 13 166 were eligible for study participation (response rate, 51.2%). Respondents were predominantly male (61.1%), practiced in private office/clinic settings (73.4%), and had graduated from medical school more than 22 years earlier. Eighty-five percent of respondents reported asking patients about their physical activity levels, whereas only 26.2% assessed patient fitness as part of a physical examination or through a fitness test and only 10.9% referred patients to others for fitness assessment or appraisal. Most physicians (69.8%) reported using verbal counseling to promote physical activity, whereas only 15.8% used written prescriptions for a physical activity promotion program. Male and female physicians responded differently. Men more frequently assessed fitness than did women, whereas women more frequently asked and provided verbal and written directions. CONCLUSIONS: This large sample of Canadian primary care physicians regularly asked patients about physical activity levels and advised them using verbal counseling. Few respondents provided written prescriptions, performed fitness assessments, or referred patients. These results suggest possible opportunities to improve physicians' counseling and prescription efforts.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".