Barriers and Facilitators for Accessing Oral Health Care for Ukrainian Newcomers to Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The war in Ukraine has resulted in a mass exodus of Ukrainians fleeing their country and seeking resettlement in many countries, including Canada. There is a lack of literature, particularly qualitative, that explores past experiences with oral health care in the country of origin for newcomers and the experience of access and utilization of oral health care once in Canada. The increase in Ukrainian newcomers to Canada requires an exploration of barriers and facilitators to oral health care access to inform policy. OBJECTIVE: To explore the barriers and facilitators to oral health care experienced by Ukrainian newcomers during resettlement in Nova Scotia, Canada. METHODS: This study used a narrative qualitative methodology. Adult Ukrainian newcomers who arrived in Canada after the Russian invasion in 2022 were recruited via social media and through recruitment flyers advertised at the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia. They were interviewed between February 17 and July 1, 2023, in the Ukrainian language. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed via inductive and deductive line-by-line coding per the thematic analysis method. Codes were grouped to form categories and themes. RESULTS: Participants identified facilitators to oral health care that included friends and family, social networks, and information provided through the workplace. Barriers to access included cost, referral process, location and wait times for specialists, language, and lack of understanding the oral health care and dental insurance systems in Canada. CONCLUSION: Ukrainian newcomers to Nova Scotia face several barriers to oral health care access. Interventions to address these barriers should be considered to ensure equitable access to oral health care services during the resettlement process.Knowledge Transfer Statement:The results of this study may be used to inform policy to facilitate timely access to oral health care for Ukrainian newcomers. The findings may also guide professionals when providing oral health care services to Ukrainian newcomers. Addressing the barriers and maximizing the facilitators to oral health care services for this population could help to improve access to oral health care services and oral health outcomes.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| 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".