Expanding access to addictions care: Implementation of a 24-hour healthcare provider support line in British Columbia, Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Morbidity and mortality related to substance use have risen to catastrophic levels in North America, and treatment services are often difficult to access. In response, the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, launched a province-wide addiction medicine support phone line that offers clinicians immediate access to phone consultation with an addictions medicine expert. The service operates 24/7 is accessible to any clinician in the province seeking assistance with an addiction-related question. We describe an evaluation of the reach and perceived impact of the service over its first two years. METHODS: The 24/7 Addiction Medicine Clinician Support Line was evaluated prospectively from June 2020 to April 2022. All provider-to-provider encounters were included. Data was collected from two primary sources: health provider demographic information collected at the time of consultation, and optional clinician surveys conducted after the consultation was complete. Descriptive data are presented as numerical values and percentages. RESULTS: Over the 22-month evaluation period, 1,279 consultations were requested by 631 distinct care providers across British Columbia. The service averaged 15 calls per week across the province, and 51.5% of calls were made outside of business hours. Physicians made the majority of calls to the service (n = 865, 67.6%), followed by nurse practitioners (n = 162, 12.7%). Among those who completed a follow-up survey (n = 258 calls, 20.2% total calls), 81.8% (n = 211) were "very" or "extremely" satisfied with the consultation. Of these respondents, 65.5% (n = 169) reported that the consultation led to the provision of better care for their patient, with 58.1% (n = 150) initiating a new prescription and 22.1% (n = 57) reporting expedited treatment for their patient. The consultation area of focus was most commonly opioid use (n = 417; 59.6%), followed by polysubstance use (n = 98; 14.0%). CONCLUSIONS: The impact of the 24/7 Addiction Clinician Support Line was widespread, and the service increased accessibility to evidence-based addictions treatment across a range of care settings. Clinicians expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the service. To our knowledge, this province-wide program is the first of its kind in North America, offering a scalable and adaptable model to support access to evidence-based addictions care in under-resourced settings.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it