Advancing public health communication in the era of empowered health consumerism: insights from dental hygienist-client interactions around community water fluoridation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within a neoliberal environment that prioritizes the individual over the community, understanding challenges associated with advancing population-level or universal interventions is important if public health is to remain a relevant collective institution. As a case example, we considered a controversial public health intervention – community water fluoridation – and undertook focus groups with dental hygienists in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to explore ways that fluoridation (a population-level intervention) is understood and discussed in their day-to-day clinical interactions as frontline cavity prevention experts. The overarching theme in our data centered around a key public health conundrum – that is, the difficulties reconciling individual and community- or population-level responsibility for health. Dental hygienists wrestled with the transdisciplinary nature of population-level public health interventions; acknowledged changing roles and relationships between themselves and their patients; and revealed dissonance in their own beliefs about individualism and collectivism in health. Our findings shed light on communication challenges where public health information delivery intersects with clinical encounters, in the context of empowered and knowledgeable health consumers. A challenge for the public health community is to reflect on how to better address a contemporary public’s reasonable information requests and negotiate the clash between individualism and collectivism more effectively.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".