Parents’ Views on Access to Dental Care and the Interim Canada Dental Benefit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Canada’s national health insurance historically excluded dental care until the introduction of the Interim Canada Dental Benefit (CBD) in October 2022. This represented a paradigm shift toward enhancing dental care accessibility for children younger than 12 y from lower-income families. This study investigated parents’ perspectives on access to oral health care and the Interim CDB. Methods: The Strategic Counsel for Health Canada collected data from participants across Canada using an online survey administered in March 2023. Data were administered to parents of children younger than 12 y with a household income less than $90,000. The survey included 45 questions covering demographics, barriers to accessing dental care, and awareness of the Interim CBD. Paired/overlap t test for means and paired/overlap z test for percentages were performed, with statistical significance set at P ≤ 0.05. Results: A total of 2,203 participants completed the survey, with a response rate of 65%. Most participants expressed concerns about the costs (90.9%) and accessibility (80.9%) of dental care, indicated that regular dental visits for children are important (97.2%), and would take their children more frequently to dental appointments if they had extra money (79.9%). Some of the barriers preventing regular dental visits for children included the costs of service and transportation and lack of insurance. Most parents supported the Interim CDB (87%), with the greatest support coming from the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan (90.4%). Conclusion: This research underscores the imperative for ongoing evaluation and policy refinement to ensure the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP) effectively addresses the nuanced needs of Canadian families, fostering a more inclusive and accessible dental care system. Parents’ concerns regarding dental care and their support for the Interim CDB signal a clear mandate for improving program outreach and accessibility through the CDCP. Knowledge Transfer Statement: This study showed the significant concerns reported by survey participants about dental care affordability in Canada and the highly positive perception of the Interim Canada Dental Benefit (CDB). This supports the necessity of programs such as the CDB and Canadian Dental Care Plan, which are crucial for the success of a policy intervention. Concern about accessing dental services, despite the availability of insurance, indicates ongoing barriers to dental care, suggesting areas for future policy refinements.
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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".