Looking for Lithotripsy: Accessibility and Portability of Canadian Healthcare
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) is a definitive, ambulatory and non-invasive modality for treating kidney stones. ESWL is not available in all urban centres and many Canadians must either travel, sometimes out of province, or wait to have this procedure performed. We sought to evaluate the variability in access to ESWL treatment. METHOD: We compiled a comprehensive list of ESWL centres in Canada and contacted all centres in 2011 to assess their wait times, out-of-province patient fees, and roles and responsibilities of the referring physician. RESULTS: We contacted all 23 ESWL facilities across Canada (100% response rate). Wait times for elective ESWL procedures ranged from one day to over one year, with a mean of 8.4 weeks (SD, 16.76 weeks). No centres refused out-of-province patients, although five discouraged travel to their centre owing to their prolonged wait times. No facilities charged extra fees for out-of-province patients. Ten (43%) facilities required a secondary consultation by a urolo-gist at the centre before booking. Twelve (52%) of the centres indicated the waiting time could be shortened if the referring physician were to advocate on the patient's behalf. Contact was repeated one year later in 2012 with five centres, and the results were similar. INTERPRETATION: There is marked variation in wait times across Canada for ESWL but there are few barriers to care. Patients' waits may be shortened by physician advocacy.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".