Access to primary care and other health care use among western Canadians with chronic conditions: a population-based survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: For adults with chronic conditions, access to primary care, including multidisciplinary care, is associated with better outcomes. Few studies have assessed barriers to such care. We sought to describe barriers to primary care, including care from allied health professionals, for adults with chronic conditions. METHODS: We surveyed western Canadians aged 40 years or older who had hypertension, diabetes, heart disease or stroke about access to primary care and other use of health care. Using log binomial regression, we determined the association between sociodemographic variables and several indicators of access to primary care and care from allied health professionals. RESULTS: Of the 2316 people who were approached, 1849 (79.8%) completed the survey. Most of the respondents (95.1%) had a regular medical doctor, but two-thirds (68.1%) did not have after-hours access. Only 6.1% indicated that allied health professionals were involved in their care, although most respondents (87.3%) indicated they would be willing to see a nurse practitioner if their primary care physician was not available. Respondents who were obese or less than 65 years of age were less likely to have a regular medical doctor. Individuals who had diabetes, lived in a rural area, were residents of Alberta or had poorer health were more likely to have allied health professionals involved in their care. INTERPRETATION: The survey results identified barriers to accessing primary care for people with chronic conditions. Opportunities for improving access to primary care may include greater involvement by allied health professionals, such as nurse practitioners.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".