Frostbite and hypothermia among individuals experiencing homelessness in the south interior region of BC: a chart review of emergency department presentations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Experiencing homelessness is a risk factor for prolonged exposure to cold weather potentially resulting in cold-related conditions (frostbite and hypothermia). The British Columbia (BC) Interior Health (IH) region experienced unseasonably cold weather in the month of December 2022 leading to patchwork community efforts to mitigate harms to the increasing number of vulnerable individuals. The goal of this study is to quantify and review circumstances around emergency department (ED) presentations for cold-related conditions in the IH region during the unseasonably cold month of December 2022 with a specific focus on those experiencing homelessness. We conducted a chart review of patients with cold-related conditions that presented to IH EDs, 1–31 December 2022. There were 77 ED presentations for cold-related conditions to 21 IH EDs, 12 rural and 9 urban, in the study period, with 62 visits presenting as frostbite/cold injury and 15 as hypothermia. Individuals experiencing homelessness accounted for 39% (30/77) of the total presentations, but up to 56.3% (27/48) of urban ED presentations and 10.3% (3/29) of rural ED presentations. Our chart review confirms that individuals experiencing homelessness are at high risk of cold-related conditions particularly in urban communities in the IH region.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".