Test, Link, Call Project: Prescribing Phones to People Who Experience Criminalization to Improve Access to Hepatitis C Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: People who experience criminalization, including people who use drugs and people who experience homelessness, have higher rates of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) and lower rates of HCV treatment uptake compared to the general Canadian population. A key reason reported for this is many do not have a cell phone, so are unable to contact healthcare providers. Methods: We launched a Quality Improvement project called ‘Test Link Call’ (TLC) in October 2021 in British Columbia, Canada. We used Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to test whether a free cell phone with a 6-month plan and connection to a Peer Health Mentor (PHM) would improve access to care among people who experience criminalization diagnosed with HCV. Participants were referred from prisons, drug treatment programs, homeless shelters, and hospitals. To evaluate the impact of TLC, semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders, which were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed. Results: Over 12 months, 141 participants received a cell phone and connection to a PHM. Interviews were conducted with 10 participants, 3 PHMs, and 5 healthcare providers. All stakeholders interviewed described TLC as effective at engaging people who experience criminalization and who are affected by HCV, and beneficial for supporting them to access treatment. Stakeholders described several benefits of TLC for participants, including elevated sense of personal value, improved convenience in accessing HCV care and other services, and increased social connection. Disadvantages reported were vulnerability of phones to theft, and technological illiteracy reducing device usability. Healthcare providers and PHMs described improved communication and trust with TLC participants due to them easily being contactable. Implications/Conclusion of Research: TLC demonstrates that providing cell phones plus connection to a PHM to people who experience criminalization with HCV infection is an effective strategy to enhance connection to HCV care, and provide added benefits to individuals including increased sense of personal value and connection to family and friends.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".