93 Mapping Mobile Health Clinics in Canada: Delivering Equitable Primary Care to Children and Vulnerable Populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Low-income and racially diverse populations often have multiple barriers in accessing healthcare and are at increased risk of poor health outcomes. COVID-19 exacerbated these health inequities: decreased in-person appointments, difficult access to virtual care and deprioritization of elective clinical activity led to delays in well-child visits and vaccination. This public health emergency highlighted a need to develop alternative models to enable access to primary care for vulnerable children. While mobile clinics are well-established in the United States, little is known about them in Canada. Objectives This study aims to characterize Canadian mobile clinics providing primary care health services to vulnerable populations, including children, and seeks to inform the implementation of a pediatric mobile clinic under development. Design/Methods This environmental scan screened scientific databases and the grey literature using a combination of terms designating mobile health clinics and Canadian locations. Relevant Canadian primary care mobile clinic initiatives were subsequently included. We defined primary care mobile clinics as movable health care units providing primary healthcare services delivered by general medical practitioners (pediatricians and family physicians). Examples of excluded initiatives were mobile clinics focused on education/literacy, dental care, vision care, endocrinology, cancer screening, safe injection sites, vaccination, physical rehabilitation and urgent care. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis were performed. Results 29 clinics were identified, of which 26 are still active. Most clinics were located in Ontario (n=11), followed by British Columbia (n=8), Alberta (n=5), Quebec (n=2) and the Maritimes (n=2). The first mobile clinic in Canada was launched in 1996, with an increasing number of new clinics in 2021. While all clinics served vulnerable populations, some targeted specific groups, such as children, people experiencing homelessness, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals and Indigenous peoples. We identified three pediatric mobile clinics, two of which targeted teenagers. Onboard the clinics, physicians often worked with nurses, outreach workers and social workers. These professionals provided primary care services, as well as healthcare navigation, sexual education, mental health care, harm reduction supplies, vaccination and emergency care. All mobile clinics partnered with their local government, charities or businesses to fund their initiative. Conclusion Mobile health clinics are a growing model of primary care in Canada. They are the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between healthcare providers, social workers and outreach workers. To this date, Canadian pediatric mobile clinics remain a handful and represent an interesting avenue to address health inequities in children, during the pandemic and beyond.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".