Everyday discrimination and barriers to primary care, mental health, and substance use services: Findings from a community-based cohort of sex workers in Vancouver, Canada (2015–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We evaluated the association between discrimination and access to primary, mental health, and substance use services among sex workers. Using baseline and semi-annual questionnaire data from a community-based cohort of sex workers in Vancouver, Canada (09/2015-02/2024), we used bivariate and multivariable logistic regression with generalized estimating equations to analyze the relationship between discrimination and access to primary care, mental health, and substance use services. Among 518 participants (2768 observations), the median discrimination score was 19 (IQR:11-25), indicating substantial discrimination. In separate multivariate models, every one-point increase in discrimination was associated with increased odds of experiencing barriers to health services (adjusted odds ratio (AOR):1.03, 95%CI:1.02-1.04), unable to access health services when needed (AOR:1.03, 95%CI:1.01-1.04), unmet need for mental health services (AOR:1.04, 95%CI:1.03-1.06), experiencing barriers to counseling for sexual trauma (AOR:1.04, 95%CI:1.02-1.05), and unmet need for substance use treatment (AOR:1.07, 95%CI:1.04-1.09). Discrimination is highly prevalent and associated with reduced access to primary, mental health, and substance use services among sex workers. There is a need for anti-discrimination efforts, including provider training and sex worker partnerships in primary care, alongside policy reforms.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".