Behind the screen: exploring the effects of home working on 999 telephone clinicians during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly stretched global healthcare provisions since its commencement in 2019. From the outset, ambulance services in the UK had to adapt and change their working practices to meet distancing requirements, to increase staff numbers and to ease the effects of staff becoming unavailable for work due to self-isolation and illness. One strategy was moving clinicians from emergency operation centres (EOCs) to working from home. Like many international services, UK ambulance services use paramedics and nurses to undertake telephone and video assessments of patients calling the 999 emergency services line in a model known as virtual care or remote clinical decision making. Virtual care is any interaction between a patient and a clinician or clinicians, occurring remotely via information technologies.Increasing evidence is becoming available to suggest that the pandemic caused harm to the well-being of healthcare workers, primarily due to the severe stress of regular exposure to death and human suffering. However, there remains a dearth of literature focusing on the well-being of remote and virtual clinicians, especially those who moved from working in EOCs to working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study reports the findings of a qualitative analysis of these effects from the clinician’s perspective. The authors hope that the findings from this study will inform the operating, well-being and leadership practices of those delivering such services.Methods: A convenience sample of telephone nurses and paramedics from one UK ambulance service where home working had been implemented were contacted. Fifteen clinicians with recent home-working experience responded to the invitation to participate out of a possible 31 (48%). All participants had previously practised remote assessment from within an EOC. Semi-structured interviews took place via video-conferencing software and were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed. An inductive approach was taken to generating codes, and both researchers separately read the transcripts before re-reading them, assigning initial themes and determining frequency.Results: Five main themes were discovered, with further associated sub-themes. The main themes were: safety; financial implications; working relationships; home-working environment; and anxiety.Conclusions: Few studies explore remote clinicians’ health and well-being. This study identified that home-working clinicians felt that there had been no detrimental impact on their health and well-being because of working from home during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some concerns were raised, these were mitigated through the support that clinicians received at home from family members, as well as from colleagues, some of whom had developed new working relationships. Financial implications appeared to have contributed to some concerns for participants initially, but these had been alleviated quickly despite requiring further exploration of the true financial impact of working from home.