Clinical Care Pathways for Second and Third Trimester Termination of Pregnancy for Medical Reasons in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Termination of pregnancy in the second/third trimester for fetal or maternal complications (i.e., for medical reasons) is an essential health service. We aimed to describe the systems-level pathways for this care in Canada. METHODS: We conducted one-on-one semi-structured interviews with maternal-fetal medicine (MFM), medical genetics, and nursing/social work clinicians at the 10 academic MFM sites in Canada. We conducted qualitative content analysis to identify categories describing the clinical care pathway. We triangulated data from participants within sites and then compared data across sites to describe similarities and differences in care. We used NVivo14 software for coding. RESULTS: We recruited 28 participants representing all sites: 10 MFM specialists, 9 medical geneticists/genetic counsellors, and 9 nurses/social workers. We identified 4 main categories describing the clinical care pathway: (1) initial visit and clinic structure, (2) offering termination, (3) provision of procedural and medication termination, and (4) post-termination care. Across sites, although clinic structure and post-termination care were similar, there were differences in offering the option of termination (e.g., variable indications qualifying for approval) and variations in details regarding the provision of procedural and medical termination (e.g., upper gestational age limits for procedural vs. medical approaches). CONCLUSIONS: Clinical care pathways for second/third trimester termination for medical reasons are variable across Canadian academic MFM centres, especially regarding circumstances under which termination is offered and details regarding the provision of procedural and medical termination. These differences provide opportunities to inform efforts to optimize equitable and comprehensive services in Canada.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".