Video consultations in general practice: tendencies and lessons learned from the first COVID-19 lockdown period
ABSTRACT
Background:
Video consultation was urgently introduced in general practice in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, where a rapid implementation ensured patients’ continued access to their general practitioner (GP). With the Danish lockdown in March 2020, the use of video consultations in general practice increased drastically and then declined significantly shortly after as society gradually reopened. Today, only a small proportion of the total number of consultations in general practice is made up of video consultations, and there is great variation in the scope and use of video consultation among GPs and practice staff.
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to present research findings from a qualitative, interdisciplinary project, investigating GP -and patient experiences with video consultations during the first lockdown period in 2020 that might contribute with explaining the above-mentioned tendencies in relation to scope -and implementation variances.
Methods:
The data corpus includes data generated through semi-structured interviews with 27 patients and 15 GPs and eight video recordings of video consultations between GP and patient.
Results:
Patients reported positive experiences with consulting their GP through video, valuing increased convenience and spatial flexibility and wishing for future use of video consultation as either a supplement or an alternative to physical consultation. Video consultation furthermore presented a new communicative context in which both patients and GPs enacted distinct forms of technologically facilitated participation. The GPs experienced various uncertainties and challenges connected to their initial use of video consultation which can be explained by lacking normalization -and routinization of video consultation in daily work life.
Conclusions:
In order to further the best use of video consultation in future general practice, organizational -and individual factors such as renumeration, task delegation, time pressure and professional identity need to be considered.
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