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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many nephrology clinics had to adapt to a telehealth mode of care to manage their patients in order to limit the risk of COVID-19 exposure. The aim of this study was to describe the experience and perspectives of nephologists on caring for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD)
Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 24 nephrologists from 20 centres across Australia. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed qualitatively.
We identified five major themes: enhancing patient-centred care (convenient for patients, enabling self-management, reducing exposure to risk, improving follow up, and alleviating financial burden in accessing care); protecting personal connection and trust (requires established rapport with clinicians, hampering honest conversations, reduced attentiveness, and missed opportunity to connect with patient); diminished ability to provide quality care (cannot physically examine patient, limited ability to assess incidentals, appropriate renumeration and loss of mentoring younger doctors); navigating technical challenges (interrupted communication, new and daunting technologies, and cognizant of patient digital literacy), fostering innovative delivery of care (improved access to care, ease of multidisciplinary discussions and expanding use of telehealth).
Telehealth minimizes overall treatment burden but cannot be used as a sole method of treating patients. Telehealth is a valuable tool in facilitating health care access and to provide high quality care improvements in internet connectivity, logistics and appropriate renumeration for appointments is required.