Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Dec 18, 2025
Date Accepted: Apr 24, 2026
Multidisciplinary Telehealth for Pediatric Developmental and Mental Healthcare in Rural and Remote Australia: A qualitative study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Geography and disadvantage impede access to appropriate services for rural and remote-dwelling children with complex developmental and mental health needs. Telehealth offers opportunities to increase access to essential health and wellbeing services for people with complex mental and developmental health needs who live in rural and remote areas, whose experiences of mental ill-health are frequently compounded by social marginalization and economic disadvantage.
Objective:
This paper aims to address knowledge gaps by describing how multidisciplinary and multimodal telehealth is delivered within a specialist service (Royal Far West; RFW) that provides mental and developmental health services to rural and remote dwelling children and families in Australia. This was done by obtaining caregiver and service provider perspectives on the challenges and value of telehealth services.
Methods:
Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with caregivers (n=11) and RFW staff (n=21) applied framework analysis.
Results:
Caregivers were generally enthusiastic about telehealth, but acknowledged potential technological limitations and challenges to effectively engaging some children. Despite acknowledging its value, RFW clinicians identified challenges with providing telehealth: technological limitations for rural families joining from home; limited capacity for some detailed clinical assessments; low cost; and potential child and family risk and safety issues.
Conclusions:
This study provides new information about the value of telehealth in rural and remote Australia, particularly when telehealth is applied in ways that consciously attend to the challenges experienced by rural and remote families. Despite challenges, rural and remote caregivers and their clinicians identified telehealth as a beneficial, accessible and effective component of multidisciplinary care for children with complex mental and developmental health needs. These caregiver and clinician perspectives will inform ongoing service development, research and advocacy. Clinical Trial: Not applicable.
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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.