“There was no services that I could access so I just stayed on the street…using until I went into labour.”: A qualitative study of accessibility and cultural safety of services for perinatal substance use in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Perinatal substance use is a critical public health challenge, impacting both mother and fetus. Its prevalence has increased in British Columbia, Canada, disproportionately impacting First Nations people. For specialized perinatal substance use services to be effective, they must be accessible and safe. This study aimed to explore the accessibility and cultural safety of health services for perinatal substance use from the perspective of service users. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study from six focus group discussions, consisting of five in-person sharing circles for people with lived/living experience of pregnancy and substance use and one virtual focus group with inreach workers, for a total of 55 participants including 48 people with lived experience and seven inreach workers across the five health delivery regions in British Columbia. We interpreted results using thematic analysis and narrative inquiry to explore inductively and deductively derived themes. RESULTS: Participants identified a lack of perinatal substance use specific services, particularly supportive housing facilities and wrap-around community centres in the province but highlighted that community-based services they were able to access made participants feel safe and respected. Thematic analysis identified six themes related to accessibility and cultural safety: geographic disparities in access to care, importance of Indigenous culture for Indigenous client's healing, transitions as critical moments in service accessibility, safe services protect the mother-infant dyad, inconsistent access to opioid agonist treatment, and relationality as a crucial element of safe service delivery. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that services that preserve the mother-infant dyad, incorporate wholistic care including Indigenous culture, and are relationship-based are experienced as accessible and safe, and those that do not are often mistrusted and avoided. This study highlights needed improvements, particularly of acute care services, through supporting instead of reporting birthing parents with substance use, ensuring continuous access to opioid agonist treatment for pregnant people with opioid use disorder, and suffusing the client-provider relationship with empathy, respect, and connection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".