Expanding Scope of Practice for Ontario Regulated Health Professionals during COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 21 April 2021, the Ontario government issued a new order under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, 1990 that authorized regulated health professionals to practice beyond their regular scope of practice when working in hospital settings and providing pandemic-related care. This order required that professionals use their best judgement in practice and work within hospital-assigned duties and privileges. It also allowed health professionals licensed in other provinces or territories to practise without an Ontario license. The goal of this temporary scope of practice expansion and suspension of licensure requirements was to expand health workforce capacity to care for COVID-19 patients. In place for just over a year, this pandemic workforce policy reform was instituted without warning to the health profession regulators in the province and raised questions about how concerns around competence to practise in these expanded roles would be resolved. While there is no clear evaluation plan for this temporary pandemic policy, restrictions and expansions to health professional scope of practice will continue to have broader implications given the worsening workforce crisis. Le 21 avril 2021, le gouvernement de l'Ontario a émis une nouvelle ordonnance en vertu de la Loi de 1990 sur la protection civile et la gestion des situations d'urgence, qui autorise les professionnels de la santé réglementés à exercer au-delà de leur champ d'exercice habituel lorsqu'ils travaillent en milieu hospitalier et fournissent des soins liés à une pandémie. Cette ordonnance exigeait que les professionnels fassent preuve de leur meilleur jugement dans leur pratique et qu'ils travaillent dans le cadre des fonctions et des privilèges assignés par l'hôpital. Elle permettait également aux professionnels de la santé titulaires d'un permis dans d'autres provinces ou territoires d'exercer sans permis en Ontario. L'objectif de cette ordonnance temporaire était d'accroître la capacité du personnel de santé à prendre en charge les patients atteints du syndrome COVID-19. En place depuis un peu plus d'un an, cette réforme de la politique a été instituée sans avertissement et a soulevé des questions quant à la façon dont les préoccupations concernant la compétence à exercer dans ces rôles élargis seraient résolues. Bien qu'il n'y ait pas de plan d'évaluation clair pour cette politique temporaire, les restrictions et l'élargissement du champ d'exercice des professionnels de la santé continueront à avoir des implications plus larges étant donné l'aggravation de la crise des effectifs.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".