Does Cost Influence the Choice of Disposable vs Reusable Instruments? Survey of Obstetrician/Gynecologists [24Q]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: A “cost awareness” campaign was undertaken at the Lois Hole Hospital for Women from 2015 to 2016 to raise awareness about costs of disposable versus reusable instruments for laparoscopic procedures. We undertook a survey of obstetrician/gynecologists (Ob/Gyns) to find out if the campaign had affected their attitudes about choosing disposable versus cheaper reusable instruments. METHODS: In 2015 and 2017, all full-time university-associated Ob/Gyns were mailed a cover letter, questionnaire and coffee card ($5) with postage-paid return envelope. Responses (with unique ID) from Ob/Gyns who perform laparoscopic procedures were entered into a password-protected REDCap database on a secure server. Data analysis used REDCap summary descriptive statistics. RESULTS: 34/47 eligible Ob/Gyns (72%) completed questionnaires before and after the intervention, with median 11.5 years in practice. The majority had undertaken MIS training, mainly during residency (78.4%) and conferences (73.0%). Before the intervention, the three most important qualities influencing their decision to use a particular instrument were safety (64.9%), effectiveness (54.1%) and personal experience (48.6%), and after the intervention were effectiveness (63.0%), safety (47.8%) and ease of use (47.8%). Device cost was ranked sixth (29.7%) before and fourth after (26.1%). CONCLUSION: Given the current economy, operative costs are constantly under review. Knowledge about Ob/Gyns’ attitudes provides information to design more effective awareness campaigns to encourage use of less costly instruments. To change practice, a campaign increasing Ob/Gyns’ exposure to cheaper but safe and effective instruments may help to increase uptake and potentially lead to cost reduction. Cost awareness alone is unlikely to change practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".