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Abstract Introduction: The well-known ‘golden hour’ target for trauma treatment is an unachievable goal in many parts of Australia. In response to the vast population spread in Queensland, Australia, telehealth infrastructure facilitates 24/7 links between rural facilities and specialist critical care physicians who provide advice and coordinate aeromedical retrievals. The purpose of this study was to understand work-as-done for specialist critical care physicians using Queensland Health’s emergency telehealth system to support rural clinicians during acute care. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 specialist critical care physicians operating under the governance of Retrieval Services Queensland to provide advice to rural clinicians through Queensland Health’s emergency telehealth system. Using an inductive approach, qualitative data were analysed in three phases: immersion; a combination of process coding and in vivo coding; and focused coding. Results: The data revealed that supporting rural teams from a distance can be simultaneously rewarding and challenging. Two categories emerged, each with the same three themes representing key challenges to providing emergency telehealth support. The first category presents these challenges, and the second category describes how telehealth technology can help to overcome, but sometimes contributes to, these challenges. Conclusions: The findings highlight that, although challenging at times, emergency telehealth support goes far beyond clinical advice; it provides an avenue to support isolated clinicians through critical, high-stress situations. The findings have several implications for telehealth technology that could reduce specialists’ mental workload and provide better access to information, thereby improving the quality of support delivered to rural teams during critical care.
Santomauro et al. (Tue,) studied this question.