Disparities in self-reported healthcare access for airways disease in British Columbia, Canada, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Insights from a survey co-developed with people living with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Patients’ perspectives on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their access to asthma and COPD healthcare could inform better, more equitable care delivery. We demonstrate this topic using British Columbia (BC), Canada, where the impact of the pandemic has not been described. We co-designed a cross-sectional survey with patient partners and administered it to a convenience sample of people living with asthma and COPD in BC between September 2020 and March 2021. We aimed to understand how access to healthcare for these conditions was affected during the pandemic. The survey asked respondents to report their characteristics, access to healthcare for asthma and COPD, types of services they found disrupted and telehealth (telephone or video appointment) use during the pandemic. We analysed 433 responses and found that access to healthcare for asthma and COPD was lower during the pandemic than pre-pandemic ( p < 0.001). Specialty care services were most frequently reported as disrupted, while primary care, home care and diagnostics were least disrupted. Multivariable logistic regression revealed that access during the pandemic was positively associated with self-assessed financial ability (OR = 22.0, 95% CI: 7.0 – 84.0, p < 0.001, reference is disagreeing with having financial ability) and living in medium-sized urban areas (OR = 2.3, 95% CI: 1.0 – 5.2, p = 0.04, reference is rural areas). These disparities in access should be validated post-pandemic to confirm whether they still persist. They also indicate the continued relevance of exploring approaches for more equitable healthcare.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".