Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Jul 17, 2025
Date Accepted: Jan 2, 2026
Behind the screen: a qualitative study exploring video consultations across the public and private sectors in Norway
ABSTRACT
Background:
Delivering therapy through video consultations can increase the reach and impact of mental healthcare services. However, adoption varies, and there is a lack of professional consensus about the usefulness of video consultations in therapy settings.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore mental health professionals’ experiences with and attitudes towards video consultations across different clinical environments in the private and public healthcare sectors in Norway to inform the design of future digitalized services.
Methods:
In this qualitative study, we recruited leaders and clinicians from public hospitals and private clinics. We conducted semistructured interviews that mapped individual experiences and attitudes concerning video consultations, as well as contextual aspects concerning the participants’ professional environments. We used reflexive thematic analysis with an inductive, essentialist, and experiential orientation to analyze the data.
Results:
Twenty-four mental health professionals (16 from public hospitals and eight from private clinics) participated. Variations in their attitudes did not follow patterns reflecting the type of service or sector they worked in. Rather, attitudes seemed related to higher-level assumptions rooted in professional culture, societal values, and previous experiences. We generated six themes capturing and structuring the professional perspectives: meta-perspectives on the digitalization of therapeutic rooms, the ‘how’ of service integration, challenging therapist culture, negotiating the limits of the digital therapy room, creating clinical value from the digital format, and adapting techniques and technology in digital therapy sessions.
Conclusions:
To strengthen the adoption and impact of video, we should direct attention towards higher-level societal and cultural aspects that shape attitudes and practices. We suggest incorporating digitalized therapy in education, facilitating personal experiences with video consultations, increasing the sharing of knowledge between clinical environments, and sparking innovation of both service models and technology
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.