Exploring English and Swedish General Practitioners’ Behavioral Intentions to Use Telemedicine: Comparative Study

TL;DR

This study compares how English and Swedish general practitioners intend to use telemedicine, finding that Swedish doctors have stronger intentions despite low training and usage in both countries.

Contribution

The study introduces a cross-country comparison of GPs' telemedicine intentions using the PAIT questionnaire, revealing insights into attitudes and behavioral predictors.

Findings

Swedish GPs showed significantly higher intentions to use telemedicine compared to English GPs.

Positive attitudes and perceived behavioral control were strongly linked to higher intention scores in both countries.

Both English and Swedish GPs reported low training and limited telemedicine use post-pandemic.

Abstract

Although telemedicine grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, instruments to assess general practitioners’ (GPs) attitudes and behavioral intentions to use it are scarce. In Sweden, the Physicians’ Attitudes and Intentions to use Telemedicine (PAIT) questionnaire was developed from the “theory of planned behavior” in 2019 and translated into English in 2022.

The aim of this study was to explore similarities and differences between behavioral intentions and predictors of intentions to use telemedicine among GPs in England and Sweden.

This study compared attitudes, behavioral intentions, and self-reported use of telemedicine after the COVID-19 pandemic among 52 GPs in England and 101 GPs in Sweden. The PAIT questionnaire has 33 items with 7-point Likert scale options ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” examining 3 predictors of intentions: attitudes (12 items), subjective norms (6 items), perceived behavioral control (9 items), and “intentions” (6 items) to use telemedicine; 22 items assess use of telemedicine tools, general questions about telemedicine, training experience, free-text comments, and demographic and background questions.

Both English and Swedish GPs reported little training and low use of telemedicine after the COVID-19 pandemic. Swedish GPs had significantly higher mean scores for intentions to use telemedicine in daily practice compared with English GPs. More positive attitudes and higher perceived behavioral control were significantly associated with higher behavioral intention scores in both English and Swedish GPs.

While our results are exploratory due to sample size constraints, these findings provide insights into the similarities and differences between English and Swedish GPs regarding telemedicine adoption—attitudes, behavioral intentions, and self-reported use of telemedicine assessed by the PAIT questionnaire—which proved useful for cross-country comparisons and could be used for further international studies.