Oral Health Practices Among Indigenous Mothers and Young Children (0–36 Months) in Northwest Territories, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives Early oral hygiene and care help prevent early childhood caries (ECC). As remote Indigenous communities in Canada have limited access to dental care, this project explores Indigenous women’s oral hygiene practices during and after pregnancy and in regard to children (0–36 months) within three communities in Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada. Methods A mixed‐methods study design was employed. Self‐identifying Indigenous women who were pregnant or had given birth within the 3 years preceding data collection (2019) were invited to complete a semi‐structured, interviewer‐administered questionnaire. Results 156 Indigenous women participated. Of participants who gave birth in the last 3 years ( n = 145), 78.8% started brushing infants’ teeth/gums. Of participants whose infants had teeth ( n = 114), 27.9% had taken the infant to a dentist. Factors impacting infant oral hygiene practices included personal experiences, access to supplies, and health literacy. Among pregnant participants ( n = 28), 38.5% had visited a dentist during pregnancy. Among participants who had given birth within 3 years ( n = 145), 67.9% had since seen a dentist. Factors impacting dental care utilization during pregnancy included service availability and safety concerns. After giving birth, factors included service availability and competing priorities. Conclusions Within Indigenous communities in NWT, inaccessible oral health care, information, and supplies made it challenging for mothers to meet oral health recommendations during and after pregnancy and in regard to young children. The findings of this project suggest the need for long‐term, collaborative strategies focused on increasing the availability and accessibility of dental care professionals and services within communities and improving oral health literacy via culturally appropriate and collaboratively developed informational initiatives.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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".