Report of a 1999 survey of public health nurses: is public health restructuring in Ontario, Canada moving toward primary health care?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public health restructuring in Ontario, Canada occurred in the midst of the rhetoric of ‘primary health care (PHC) reform’. The purpose of this descriptive mailed survey of nurses working in public health nursing in Ontario, Canada was to describe the nature and scope of public health nursing practice, establish a baseline against which to monitor future change, examine nurses’ reports of changes in practice that had occurred in the previous five years, and determine current public health nursing staffing levels. Findings were examined to ascertain whether the changes had moved Ontario closer to PHC. Two sets of questionnaires were mailed in 1999: one to a public health nurse (PHN) in a senior manager position in each of Ontario’s 37 official public health units and one to all PHNs in Ontario.Response rate was 87% for the managers’ surveys (n = 32) and 77% for PHNs (n = 2242). Reported staffing levels represent an 11% reduction in public health nursing full-time equivalents (FTEs) from 1988 data. Furthermore, between 1993 and 1998, the population:nurse ratio rose 32% from 3710:1 to 4910:1. Many traditional public health nursing services, such as those to individuals, families, and schools, had been reduced or eliminated. Significant regional disparities were revealed. Nurses used a wide variety of individual, community, and population-focused health promotion strategies consistent with principles of PHC in their practice but evidence suggested the continuance of biomedical domination of public health and public health nursing, rather than the shift to a multidisciplinary model that would be more consistent with PHC.Findings suggest that changes in public health nursing over the last 20 years are incongruent with several tenets of PHC, such as equity, accessibility, social justice, and community participation.
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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 | 0.046 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| 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".