Regulation of Dental Hygienists: Its Effect on Disciplinary Action and Opinions of Regulatory Board Members in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was two-fold. The first was to examine the effect of regulatory status (dentist versus dental hygienist control) on disciplinary sanctions for dental hygiene practitioners. The second was to assess the opinions of board members concerning the regulation of the practice of dental hygiene. Regulatory bodies from jurisdictions with and without dental hygiene self-regulation in both Canada and the United States respectively were examined to determine if differences exist in opinions and sanctions exercised by the two. A self-designed questionnaire titled the Mueller-Dental Hygiene Regulatory Questionnaire was used to obtain descriptive data on a sample of 44 members of boards regulating dental hygiene. The questionnaire was divided into three sections, "Disciplinary Sanctions," "Opinions," and "Demographics." Data obtained in the "Disciplinary Sanctions" portion of the study were from dentist controlled boards only. Members of dental hygienist controlled boards were unable to complete information concerning disciplinary sanctions, as they were newly formed and had not yet exercised disciplinary sanctions against dental hygiene practitioners. Data from the dentist controlled boards showed a great variability and no set standard for exercising disciplinary sanctions against dental hygiene practitioners was observed. Data obtained in the "Opinions" portion of the study were analyzed using the Kendall Taub measure of association. The results suggest wide variability in the opinions of both dentist and dental hygienist controlled boards concerning the regulation of the practice of dental hygiene. The Board members' opinions regarding the right of the dental hygiene profession to be self-regulated, whether dental hygiene should have regulatory autonomy from dentistry, whether self-regulation would benefit dental hygiene as a profession and whether dental hygienists on separate regulatory boards can more accurately monitor themselves are all strongly associated with the type of board the respondent was from. The two areas with the weakest association related to dental hygienists being educated enough to become self-regulated and dental hygiene self-regulation leading to independent practice.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".