Patients’ and Caregivers’ Views on Communication in the Referral–Consultation Process: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study aimed to describe patients' and caregivers' views on referral-consultation communication, how communication impacted their care and their perspectives on the components required in high-quality communication. Purposeful and convenience sampling was used to recruit participants from urban and rural areas who had been referred to Alberta specialists. Twenty participants joined one of four focus groups - two in-person and two teleconferences. Thematic analysis was conducted on the transcripts and field notes using NVivo 12 Pro. Participants reported inadequate communication between patients, family physicians and specialists. They discussed how incomplete information impacted their continuity of care, led to inappropriate referrals and caused delays in timely diagnosis or follow-up, all of which resulted in health consequences. They wanted physicians and healthcare professionals to engage them using a person-centred approach and provide a point of contact and timely updates of their referral statuses. This article includes participant feedback that can be used to improve closed-loop communications for referrals.
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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 | 0.032 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".