Evaluation of users and health professionals on teleconsultation in primary care: A cross-sectional study

Objective: To evaluate the perceptions and preferences of users and health professionals on teleconsultation in primary care.Design: Cross-sectional study with a telephone survey of users and a face-to-face survey of professionals carried out at 2021.Setting: Urban primary health care.Participants: Random sample of users with teleconsultations in the last year, stratified by sex and age, and doctors and nurses from participating centres.Measurements: Likert variables assessing teleconsultation according to consultation motives, preferences and related aspects. Descriptive analysis and comparison of proportions and means.Results: Three hundred patients and 48 professionals answered the questionnaire. Both groups value positively the teleconsultation for the management of the electronic prescription (EP) (83% and 83%, respectively), sick leave (SL) (80% and 64%) and issues related to COVID-19 (71% and 58%). The positive assessment of teleconsultation decreases for the treatment of acute pathologies (47% and 25%) and chronic diseases (49% and 33%). Globally, people <70 years value teleconsultation more highly (P<.001), without differences between sexes.Users and professionals prefer face-to-face consultation for chronic diseases (82% and 83%) and acute pathologies (82% and 94%), and teleconsultation for EP (68.7% and 88.6%). 52% of users prefer face-to-face visits for SL compared to 29% of professionals (P<.05).Conclusions: Teleconsultation implementation has been well valued by both patients and pro-fessionals. The face-to-face visit is preferred for chronic and acute pathologies, especially in the elderly. It will be necessary to define in which cases teleconsultation is the best tool according to the characteristics of each population.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).