Barriers to utilization of dental services for children among low-income families in Alberta.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To explore reasons for underutilization of dental services covered by a governmental funded program in Alberta. METHODS: A survey questionnaire was sent to 4,000 randomly selected clients of Alberta Health Benefit program. Only respondents with children were included in the analysis. Reasons were explored among those who indicated that their children did not receive any dental services in the year prior to the survey (non-users). Difficulties faced by those who reported receiving at least one dental service (users) were also collected. RESULTS: Among 795 returned surveys, 597 had at least one child. A total of 1,303 children aged 1 to 19 years (mean age = 11.79 years, SD = 4.2) were included in the analysis. Of the 1,303 children, 443 (34%) did not receive any covered dental services (non-users); the most common reason (50.7%) was 'no perceived need' labeled for the replies 'my child was too young or had no dental problems' followed by perceived insufficient coverage (38.6%). The most common challenge reported by the dental care users was also insufficient coverage (44.9%). About 57% of parents were aware of the covered yearly fluoride application; however, only 34.3% of their children received fluoride and 14.2% had sealants. CONCLUSIONS: Low-income families underutilized available dental benefits for children. Perceived need seemed to be the primary determinant of utilization. Parental awareness about the coverage did not seem to promote the utilization of preventive measures for young children.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".