Barriers to Adopting a Fistula-First Policy in Europe: An International Survey among National Experts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to explore how vascular access care was reimbursed, promoted, and organised at the national level in European and neighbouring countries. METHODS: An electronic survey among national experts to collect country-level data. RESULTS: Forty-seven experts (response rate, 76%) from 37 countries participated. Experts from 23 countries reported that 50% or less of patients received routine preoperative imaging of vessels. Nephrologists placed catheters and created fistulas in 26 and 8 countries, respectively. Twenty-one countries had a fee per created access; the reported fee for catheter placement was never higher than for fistula creation. As the number of haemodialysis patients in a centre increased, more countries had a dedicated coordinator or multidisciplinary team responsible for vascular access maintenance at the centre-level; in 11 countries, responsibility was always with individual nephrologists, independent of a centre's size. In 23 countries, dialysis centres shared vascular access care resources, with facilitation from a service provider in 4. In most countries, national campaigns (n = 35) or educational programmes (n = 29) had addressed vascular access-related topics; 19 countries had some form of training for creating fistulas. Forty experts considered the current evidence base robust enough to justify a fistula-first policy, but only 13 believed that more than 80% of nephrologists in their country would attempt a fistula in a 75-year-old woman with comorbidities. CONCLUSIONS: Suboptimal access to surgical resources, lack of dedicated training of clinicians, limited routine use of preoperative diagnostic imaging and patient characteristics primarily emerged as potential barriers to adopting a fistula-first policy in Europe.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".