Evaluating Wait Time Management Strategies for Canadian Physiotherapy Services: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Wait times for publicly-funded physiotherapy (PT) services in Canada — such as those for outpatients recovering from surgery or children with disabilities — are high, which may force people to pay for care or face deteriorating quality of life. Specific waitlist management strategies are needed to address this problem, but there is no review on the subject in Cochrane and much of the current research focuses on reducing wait times in emergency rooms or surgery departments. PT is a different context with more flexibility in appointment structure (ie. length of time or number of patients) and thus more possible strategies to reduce wait times. This scoping review aims to identify which of those have already been studied in the Canadian context. Methods: This review was conducted using Arksey and O’Malley’s 2005 framework. EMBASE, Medline, CINAHL, SportDiscus, Canada Commons and Canada Research Index were searched for articles which evaluated wait time management strategies (WTMS) specific for PT services in Canada. A gray literature search of all the PT association and college websites across Canada was also conducted. Results: The eleven studies meeting inclusion criteria were conducted across Canada and evaluated diverse strategies through a range of outcomes. The most frequent were structural/organizational outcomes, but wait times and feedback from professionals were also common. Most often, strategies involved changing how PT services were delivered. Discussion: Further research needs to be done as very few studies were found meeting inclusion criteria. Included studies did not consistently report the context, population, or outcome measurement in enough detail for stakeholders in healthcare to examine the clinical applicability or for future researchers to compare the effectiveness of interventions. No results from the gray literature search were included, suggesting that WTMS for PT are not an area of focus for PT associations and colleges in Canada. Conclusions: There is a need for further evaluation of wait time management strategies in the unique context of PT, with improved reporting to make evidence-based practice feasible. We suggest that stakeholder groups in healthcare should consider wait time management for PT a higher priority and encourage further research.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".