The preliminary opinion of Canadian spine surgeons on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID); a cross-sectional survey of Canadian Spine Society (CSS) members
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: On June 17, 2016, providing medical assistance in dying became legal in Canada. This controversial change has had reverberating implications for the entire medical community. This is especially true for physicians that regularly deal with end-of-life decisions, among them neurosurgical and orthopedic spine surgeons, whose patients suffer from a variety of debilitating conditions. With this study we sought to document the opinions of Canadian spine surgeons in hopes of better understanding the sentiment within the speciality towards this change and assess how it evolves over time. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was sent out to members of the Canadian Spine Society (CSS). The survey encompassed 21 questions pertaining to opinions and attitudes regarding MAID and different facets of the legislation. RESULTS: A total of 51 surgeons responded to the survey, comprised of a mix of orthopedic surgeons (68.6%), pediatric orthopedic surgeons (5.9%), and neurosurgeons (21.6%), practicing all across Canada. The majority support the patients' right to obtain MAID (62.8%) and the right of physicians to participate (82.4%). Most also support the right to conscientious objection (90.1%). The results were split on duty to refer patients for MAID (49.0%). Respondents were also divided on whether they could foresee themselves referring to a MAID service, with 37.2% responding yes. A small minority of respondents (3.9%) felt they could see themselves actively involved in MAID. CONCLUSIONS: At the advent of legal MAID, the majority of members of the CSS supported both the right of patients to participate in MAID and the right of physicians to provide this service if they so choose, while still respecting the principle of conscientious objection. Of note, only a small minority were willing to be actively involved. This survey provides a useful baseline of opinions in this practice area and will be used to analyze changes over the next 10 years.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".