Lived Experiences of Patients Receiving Hemodialysis during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study from the Quebec Renal Network
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Hemodialysis patients have faced unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. They face high risk of death if infected and have unavoidable exposure to others when they come to hospital three times weekly for their life-saving treatments. The objective of this study was to gain a better understanding of the scope and magnitude of the effects of the pandemic on the lived experience of patients receiving in-center hemodialysis. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 patients who were undergoing dialysis treatments in five hemodialysis centers in Montreal from November 2020 to May 2021. Interviews were transcribed and then analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results: Most participants reported no negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their hemodialysis care. Several patients had negative feelings related to forced changes in their dialysis schedules, and this was especially pronounced for indigenous patients in a shared living situation. Some patients were concerned about contracting COVID-19, especially during public transportation, whereas others expressed confidence that the physical distancing and screening measures implemented at the hospital would protect them and their loved ones. Some participants reported that masks negatively affected their interactions with health care workers, and for many others, the pandemic was associated with feelings of loneliness. Finally, some respondents reported some positive effects of the pandemic, including use of telemedicine and creating a sense of solidarity. Conclusions: Patients undergoing hemodialysis reported no negative effects on their medical care but faced significant disruptions in their routines and social interactions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, they showed great resilience in their ability to adapt to the new reality of their hemodialysis treatments. We also show that studies focused on understanding the lived experiences of indigenous patients and patients from different ethnic backgrounds are needed in order reduce inequities in care during public health emergencies.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it