The Use of and Attitude Towards Telehealth in Rural Communities

Abstract

This paper reports on the attitudes of a sample of health care providers towards the use of telehealth to support rural patients and integrate rural primary health and urban hospital care. Telehealth and other information technologies hold the promise of improving the quality of care for people in rural and remote areas and for supporting rural primary health care providers. While seemingly beneficial for rural patients, study participants believed that telehealth remains underused and poorly integrated into their practice. In general, participants thought that telehealth is potentially beneficial but places constraints on their activities, and few actually used it. Published literature usually reports either on the success of telehealth pilot projects or initiatives that are well resourced and do not reflect the constraints of routine practice, or has an international focus limiting its relevance to the Australian context. Because of the paucity of systematic and generalisable research into the effects of the routine use of telehealth to support rural patients, it is unclear why health care professionals choose to provide such services or the costs and benefits they incur in doing so. Research and policy initiatives continue to be needed to identify the impact of telehealth within the context of Australian primary health care and to develop strategies to support its use.

Changing attitudes towards teletherapy in Austrian therapists during the COVID-19 pandemic

“… Effect size interpretation: Cramer-V .07, .21 and .35 represents small, medium and large effects, respectively (degrees of freedom: 2). 8 CI: confidence interval; OT: occupational therapists, PT: physiotherapists, SLT: speech and language therapists. Question posed to those therapists who indicated at least some experience with teletherapy ( n of n participants).…”

“…7 Especially in rural regions, the possibility to provide services over great distances positively influences attitudes. 8 Attitudes may change over time, with individual telehealth experience being a potential positive or negative factor of influence. 7,9 Besides experience, historical events can provoke attitude change.…”

Challenges faced in implementation of a telehealth enabled chronic wound care system

“…Telemedicine users must be well trained and supported, both technically and professionally. 6. Telemedicine applications should be evaluated and sustained in a clinically appropriate and userfriendly manner.…”

“…Maldron surveyed healthcare providers regarding their perceived barriers to telehealth and identified deficits in user experience, technological and managerial support, and resourcing of equipment and staff time 6 . Yellowlees 5 and Maldron 6 also highlighted the need for telehealth applications to be simple and located on desktop computers that are part of clinicians' usual working environment.…”

The potential of telehealth for ‘business as usual’ in outpatient clinics

“…3 Stakeholders (patients, clinicians, funders, technology providers and support, government) are concerned about who benefits and how, the cost of telemedicine, the nature and functionality of the technology, administrative processes, medico-legal implications and workload consequences. 3,4 Guidelines may improve telemedicine adoption. 2 The aim of the present study was to establish how telehealth could become 'business as usual' in specialist outpatient clinics.…”