Abstract Body

Background and purpose - In the context of 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, healthcare services had to get reorganized and resorted to teleconsultation in their clinical practice. This study’s main goal is to know the portuguese Family Doctors’ perspective over the utility of teleconsultation in their future clinical practice. Secondarily, it also sought to recognize advantages and disadvantages of teleconsultation, identify possible difficulties and under what circumstances it may represent an added value.

Methods - A cross-sectional study was realized between September 2020 and January 2021 through the application of an online questionnaire. The target population were Family Medicine physicians and residents, who worked in primary healthcare belonging to portuguese National Health Service.

Results - 377 responses were received. 83,6% of participants consider that teleconsultation represents a valuable asset to the future of medicine. The main identified advantage was the greater accessibility by patients to healthcare (68,7%) and the main disadvantage was the impossibility to perform a proper physical examination (81,2%). The lack of appropriate resources, like phone line, camera, internet connection and suitable software was considered the major barrier (70%). 47,8% of the participants answered that the relative time needed for a teleconsultation should be the same as for an usual consultation of the same typology. The type of consultation considered to be the most appropriate to telemedicine was Adult Health (68,7%).

Conclusions - In the portuguese Family Doctors’ perspective, teleconsultation will become essential to the future of Primary Care, even though a long way has to go in order to understand its best applicability.