Nurses’ Experience Using Telehealth in the Follow-Up Care of Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease—A Scoping Review

TL;DR

This scoping review explores nurses' experiences using telehealth for follow-up care of inflammatory bowel disease patients, highlighting benefits and barriers.

Contribution

The study maps the current understanding of telehealth benefits and barriers specifically from nurses' perspectives in IBD follow-up care.

Findings

IBD telenursing empowers patients by improving health literacy and self-care skills.

Telehealth optimizes staffing time and is generally easy to use.

Barriers include workload increases, technical issues, and concerns about patient-nurse relationships.

Abstract

Background: Due to the lack of curative treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), patients need lifelong follow-up care. Telehealth offers a valuable solution to balance routine visits with necessary monitoring. Objectives: To map what is known about the benefits and barriers encountered by nurses in their use of telehealth for the follow-up care of patients with IBD. Methods: Following the methodology from the Joanna Briggs Institute, we conducted a scoping review across four electronic databases from June 2024 to September 2025. Key search terms included “inflammatory bowel disease,” “nurse experience,” and “telehealth.” A content analysis was employed to summarize the key findings. Results: We screened 1551 records, ultimately including four original research articles from four countries. Benefits identified were as follows: (1) the vital contributions of IBD telenursing in empowering patients by bridging health literacy and self-care skills; (2) optimal use of staffing time supports patient-centred care; and (3) ease of use. Barriers included the following: (1) increased workload and task imbalances; (2) the need for customized interventions; (3) technical issues and concerns regarding the security of digital systems; (4) telehealth as a supplementary option or a standard procedure; and (5) concerns related to the patient–nurse relationship. Conclusions: Nurses view telehealth as a promising approach that enhances patients’ health literacy and self-care skills and improves patient outcomes through effective monitoring. To fully realize telehealth’s potential, implementing strategies like triage protocols, algorithmic alerts, electronic health record integration, and comprehensive nurse training to enhance patient care and engagement may be beneficial. This scoping review highlights the need for more research on nurses’ experiences with telehealth in IBD due to limited publications.

Figures