Telenursing: The view of care professionals in selected EU countries. A pilot study.

BACKGROUND: With the growth of digital nursing, several studies have focused on recording patients' views on remote care, or specialised nurse staffing aspects. This is the first international survey on telenursing focused exclusively on clinical nurses that analyses the dimensions of usefulness, acceptability, and appropriateness of telenursing from the staff point of view.

METHODS: A previously validated structured questionnaire including demographic variables, 18 responses with a Likert-5 scale, three dichotomous questions, and one overall percentual estimation of holistic nursing care susceptible to being undertaken by telenursing, was administered (from 1 September to 30 November 2022) to 225 clinical and community nurses from three selected EU countries. Data analysis: descriptive data, classical and Rasch testing.

RESULTS: The results show adequacy of the model for measurement of the domains of usefulness, acceptability, and appropriateness of telenursing (overall Cronbach's alpha 0.945, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin 0.952 and Bartlett's p < 0.001). Answers in favour of telenursing ranked 4 out of 5 in Likert scale, both globally and by the three domains. Rasch: reliability coefficient 0.94, Warm's main weighted likelihood estimate reliability 0.95. In the ANOVA analysis, the results for Portugal were significantly higher than those for Spain and Poland, both overall and for each of the dimensions. Respondents with bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees score significantly higher than those with certificates or diplomas. Multiple regression did not yield additional data of interest.

CONCLUSIONS: The tested model proved to be valid, but although the majority of nurses are in favour of telenursing, given the nature of the care, which is mainly face-to-face, according to the respondents, the chances of carrying out their activities by telenursing is only 35.3%. The survey provides useful information on what can be expected from the implementation of telenursing and the questionnaire proves to be a useful tool to be applied in other countries.