Exploring Dysphagia Assessment and Management in Canadian Primary Care: A Clinical Practice Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oropharyngeal dysphagia (OD), or dysphagia, is associated with malnutrition, pneumonia, and hospital admissions, and affects up to 35% of older adults in the community. This study aimed to understand dysphagia assessment and management practices among registered dietitians (RDs), speech-language pathologists (SLPs), and occupational therapists (OTs) working with adults in Canadian primary care and to help identify gaps and opportunities to optimize dysphagia patient care.A 22-question online practice survey was administered to RDs, SLPs, and OTs recruited through professional associations and practice groups.A total of 126 respondents partially or fully completed the survey. Clinical swallowing evaluations/mealtime observations were the primary assessment method used by RDs (92%), SLPs (83%), and OTs (50%). Patient education, oral care, and diet modifications were indicated as the top three management strategies. Challenges identified in dysphagia care included patient adherence to management strategies and limited personnel for assessing and managing dysphagia. Inter-professional clinical care pathways, patient/caregiver resources, and professional training for dysphagia assessment were identified to be the most valued resources for providing care.Timely assessment and management are crucial for community-living individuals with dysphagia. Finding unique and sustainable ways to overcome challenges in managing dysphagia in primary care will help improve care for this vulnerable population.
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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 | 0.027 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".