How do dentists perceive portable dentistry? A qualitative study conducted in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: People with impaired mobility face difficulty accessing dental care. One solution is portable dentistry, which includes delivering dental care in homes or residential institutions. Dentists, however, appear reluctant to offer such services. Our objective was to understand how dentists perceived portable dentistry and potential challenges to its implementation. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative descriptive study based on semi-structured interviews with a sample of dentists in Quebec, Canada. We employed a combination of maximum variation and snowball sampling strategies to recruit 14 participants. The interviews were conducted and audio-recorded through Zoom and lasted approximately 40 minutes. After transcribing them, we performed a thematic analysis with a combination of inductive and deductive coding. RESULTS: Despite perceiving portable dentistry as a valuable practice model, participants showed little interest in adopting this approach, arguing it was not every dentist's "job" to provide portable services. They believed portable dentistry must be financially burdensome and difficult to integrate into their daily work due to lack of time and portable equipment. Accordingly, participants considered it was the duty of governments, professional organisations overseeing dentistry education and practice, and dental schools to develop portable dentistry programs and hire dentists to deliver such services. CONCLUSIONS: To promote portable dentistry, it may be necessary to improve the knowledge and competencies of dentists, but also to challenge their professional identity as well as the current model of dental clinics as the standard of care delivery. To achieve this, we need strong leadership from dental schools, professional organisations and government.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".