A Review of System-Level and Practitioner Relevant Factors That Improve Access to Primary Dental Care for Children Living in Vulnerable Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The distribution of childhood caries and dental surgery in BC and Canada is inequitable and is a potential indicator of limited access to prevention and treatment through primary dental care. This paper focuses on different ways to improve access to primary dental care, specifically with an interest in better meeting the needs of children 0-18 years of age living in vulnerable contexts. Findings from this research indicate that policies and investment strategies that reduce the cost of primary dental care have significant impact on improving access, and that a combination of interventions that address economic, safety and health human resource related barriers to care can contribute. Innovative funding and staffing models, inter-disciplinary collaboration, the use of technology and transport, child centered and friendly care and targeted training, recruitment and retention strategies all contribute to increasing access. This paper recommends continued advocacy for policy changes to include primary dental care for children and youth as a part of the Canada Health Act as well as local planning that looks at innovative, creative, flexible and family-friendly ways of providing service, building staffing and maximizing the usage of existing infrastructure and resources.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".