Being a Physician in Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic and Alternative Health Care Service: Telemedicine: Prospective Survey Study.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: In this study, we aimed to detect anxiety levels of the physicians during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and to assess the knowledge, perspective, and willingness of the physicians about telemedicine. Materials and Methods: This was a survey study of physicians from different specialties who provided patient care during the pandemic in Turkey. A total of 824 physicians responded to questionnaire, which consisted of 5 sections (1) demographic characteristics; (2) anxiety level; (3) knowledge; (4) perspective; and (5) willingness to use telemedicine. Results: Fifty-six percent of the participants were found to experience mild-to-severe anxiety during the pandemic. It was found that the early career physicians most likely report anxiety about COVID-19 (p = 0.012). Physicians working in training and research hospital settings had higher Beck Anxiety Inventory scores compared to their colleagues working in private health care institutions (p = 0.011). Anxiety levels of physicians were not affected by working experience, existence of comorbidities, or living conditions of the participants (p = 0.138, p = 0.317, and p = 0.123, respectively). The results showed that the participants had a low level of knowledge about telemedicine. Only 61.1% of the physicians stated that they had heard of telemedicine before. The physicians who experienced telemedicine before (N = 76, 9.2% of all the participants) were more likely to find telemedicine beneficial both in pandemic (p < 0.001) and postpandemic period (p = 0.002). Conclusions: About half of our physicians had different levels of anxiety during the pandemic, and this anxiety seemed to be more related to infecting their relatives. Participants thought that providing health care services with telemedicine during the pandemic period would be beneficial and reduce the spread of hospital-acquired COVID-19. However, there was no consensus among the participants regarding the use of telemedicine in the postpandemic period.