Exploring the awareness, knowledge and perceptions of palliative care at end-of-life in a Canadian population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The role of palliative care (PC) in chronic disease and end-of-life (EOL) management is rapidly evolving. However, studies globally have demonstrated limited public knowledge and awareness of PC with several misconceptions.Objective The purpose was to expand upon previous Canadian studies by providing more current and detailed information about the awareness, knowledge and perceptions of PC in EOL management. Additionally, the reliability of self-reported PC knowledge was explored.Methods A cross-sectional study using an 8-item questionnaire was conducted at an urban medical centre with 100 adults. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were used for analyses.Results Ninety-one participants had heard of PC, while 58 reported being knowledgeable of PC services. Females were significantly more knowledgeable than males (p < 0.05). Most participants knew that PC improves a patient’s quality of life (n = 71), would not shorten life in a dying individual (n = 71) and can be provided in locations outside of the hospital (n = 72). Many indicated that involving PC services would not make them feel like they were giving up hope. There was less awareness around when to involve PC services, as there were mixed answers to whether PC is only needed if someone is dying from an illness. Two-thirds of participants who reported being knowledgeable of PC answered at least 75% of questions correctly.Conclusion Participants were quite aware and knowledgeable of PC but would benefit from education about the PC role in both chronic disease and EOL management. Self-reported knowledge was a fairly reliable indicator of true knowledge in this study.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".