What is it about?
This article uses information and data from nine different qualitative studies to present a cohesive picture of how rehab clinicians (speech pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and respiratory therapists) felt about telehealth before the COVID-19 pandemic. Generally, clinicians felt positively about telehealth and attitudes across different types of clinicians were similar. However, clinicians with less experience in telehealth were more likely to express reservations.
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Why is it important?
Our findings offer recommendations to increase clinicians' acceptance and use of telehealth, which is the most important factor in a successful telehealth program. We have established an important baseline measure of how clinicians' felt toward telehealth before COVID-19. The pandemic resulted in an emergency widescale forced adoption of telehealth across all healthcare disciplines . This article will allow researchers to determine how the pandemic affected clinicians' telehealth experience more accurately. Clinical, research and educational implications are also discussed.
Perspectives
I hope this article highlights the importance of clinicians' acceptance of the telehealth model and that telehealth companies use the information to improve their support of clinicians. I also think this is important information to target during graduate training/education now that telehealth is much more common. I will be interested to see how clinicians' attitudes change as a result of the pandemic, as emerging research shows that a majority of clinicians have switched back to in-person.
Hannah Douglass
University of Kentucky
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Clinician Perspectives of Telehealth Pre–COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Qualitative Metasynthesis, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, April 2023, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2022_persp-22-00074.
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