Propping up the parents: An environmental scan of childcare programs available to cancer patients in North America.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
e18805 Background: Approximately 20% of newly diagnosed cancer patients are between the ages of 20 and 54, and many of these patients are also the primary caregivers of children. Qualitative studies focusing on this demographic indicate that patients who are parents struggle to balance their own care needs with those of their children. Further, a lack of childcare support during cancer treatments can negatively impact compliance and increase existing psychological stress for patients. In the efforts to establish a child-minding program at a major Canadian cancer centre, we carried out an environmental scan to evaluate the current state of childcare support for cancer patients. Methods: Firstly, a literature scan was conducted in order to assess current knowledge about childcare and cancer patients, which included the use of search engines, directed internet searches, a review of oncology conference proceedings and websites of oncology associations. Literature was selected based on pre-determined criteria. Secondly, 12 representatives from major Canadian cancer centres (CCC) completed a questionnaire assessing current childcare strategies at their respective institutions. Finally, a broad scan of the grey literature was conducted by investigating 161 Canadian and American hospitals for on-site childcare services, using lay-accessible searching techniques (hand-searching hospital websites, phone and email correspondences). Results: The literature scan identified seventeen primary articles, which focused largely on exploring the role strain faced by patients who are also parents. A single study explored the instrumental challenges of being a parent with cancer, and formally assessed the childcare needs of these patients. The questionnaire results indicated that only two of the twelve investigated CCCs had established an approach to child-minding for patients. The grey literature scan identified twenty-six on-site, patient-accessible child-minding centres at hospitals in Canada and the US based on pre-determined inclusion criteria. Of these, 76.9% of centres were associated with pediatric hospitals, and 69.2% were located in the United States. Most centres (76.9%) were open for over 30 hours per week, and 88.5% of centres were free of charge to users. Conclusions: These findings generally indicate that a minority of Canadian and American hospitals and cancer centres have formal childcare services in place to support patients who are also parents. As cancer patients are at increased risk for financial toxicity, they may be particularly in need of this kind of instrumental support. This highlights the importance of carrying out a targeted needs assessment in order to fully elucidate the need for patient-accessible childcare services at CCCs.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".