Physician Assistants — A Solution to Wait Times in Canada?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Access to medical care is limited in most of Canada, and the population often endures lengthy waiting times to see a physician. The use of new and varied health care providers has been suggested as a means to alleviate the shortage of physicians. This paper reviews the history and role of the Physician Assistant (PA), both in Canada and internationally, and outlines the clinical competencies currently held by this provider to fill the role of a physician extender in our country. PAs' experiences are reported in the Canadian Forces (CF), where they have been employed for many years, and in Manitoba, where they are used as surgical assistants. The potential for the PA to be incorporated into our provincial health care systems will be considered in light of common barriers to Health Human Resources (HHR) strategic implementation.
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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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".