The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Restrictions on the Provision of Adult Congenital Heart Disease Care Across Canada: A National Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted healthcare access across Canada with reduction on in person evaluations. The aim of the study was to examine the effects of COVID pandemic on access to health care services amongst the Canadian population with ACHD. Methods All Canadian Adult Congenital Heart affiliated centers were contacted and asked to collect data on outpatient clinic and procedural volumes for the 2019 and 2020 calendar years. A survey was sent detailing questions on clinic and procedural volumes and wait times pre and post pandemic restrictions. Descriptive statistics were used with student t test to compare groups. Results In 2019, there were 19,326 ACHD clinic visits across Canada, only 296 (1.5%) were virtual clinic visits. During the first year of the pandemic there were 20,532 clinic visits, however 11412 (56%) were virtual visits (p<0.0001). There were no differences in procedural volumes (electrophysiology, cardiac surgery and percutaneous intervention) between 2019 and 2020. The mean estimated wait times (months) pre-pandemic compared to the pandemic were as follow; non-urgent consult 5.4 +2.6 vs. 6.6 +4.2 (p=0.65), ACHD surgery 6.0 +3.5 vs.7.0 +4.6 (p=0.47), electrophysiology procedures 6.3 +3.3 vs 5.7 + 3.3 (p=0.72) and percutaneous intervention 4.6 +3.9 vs 4.4 +2.3 (p=0.74). Conclusion During the pandemic and restrictions of social distancing the use of virtual clinics visits helped to maintain continuity in ACHD clinical care, with 56% of ACHD visits being virtual. The procedural volumes and wait times for consultation, percutaneous and surgical interventions were not delayed.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".