Access to Spine Care: A Tale of Two Cities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: As governments struggle with increasing demand for accountability within the Canadian Health Care System and set wait-time standards, it is important to objectify data to allow a true understanding of present limitations and to facilitate comparisons to other systems. The purpose of this study was to compare wait list times for a cohort of patients requiring spinal surgery in Calgary, Alberta to a similar cohort in Sydney, Australia. METHODS: From January 1 until June 30, 2006 all outpatients admitted for spinal surgery to the Foothills Hospital were identified by the surgeons' office. Two time periods were quantified from their charts: (1) time from referral to surgical consultation; and (2) time from surgical consultation to operative intervention. From July 1 until December 31,2006 patients were similarly identified through Neurosurgical offices at the Prince of Wales Public and Private Hospitals in Sydney, Australia. RESULTS: Four hundred ninety-one surgical patients were captured during the six month period in Calgary and 155 patients during the subsequent six months in Sydney. The majority of patients in Sydney were treated in the Private Health Care system. Public patients in Sydney have access to a surgical consultant twice as fast as public patients in Calgary while private patients have access ten times faster. Access to operating room time within the public system is a rate limiting step in both countries. However, Sydney private patients receive their surgery four times faster than Calgary patients. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to Calgary, access to specialized spine care in Sydney appears more efficient not only in the Private but also the Public Health Care System. Part of this efficiency may arise from offloading from the public into the private system. Solutions proposed to reduce wait list times should consider benefits of a Private Health Care System.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".