Direct support professional perspectives on the value of virtual healthcare for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities: Trends over four years.

Background: Direct support professionals (DSPs) often play a critical role in supporting healthcare interactions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) but little is known about their experience supporting virtual healthcare.

Objective: This study explored utilization of virtual care and DSP experiences of supporting virtual care at four time points in Ontario, Canada.

Methods: DSPs in Ontario were invited to participate in an online survey in 2020 (n = 867), 2021 (n = 428), 2022 (n = 698) and 2023 (n = 603). This study focuses on the subset of questions related to DSP experience supporting virtual healthcare. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize quantitative data and content analysis was used to analyze open text responses.

Results: Over the four surveys, reported utilization of phone-based care was consistently higher (53-60 %) than video-based care (20-30 %). DSPs were more likely to provide positive feedback for video-based care compared with phone-based care, however, there was a decline in positive feedback for both over the four surveys. Though video-based care in particular was identified as valuable for patients who struggle to attend in-person appointments, ongoing challenges were reported including technical issues and poor communication quality.

Conclusions: Without the overwhelming concern of COVID transmission, for many patients, the benefits of virtual care may not outweigh the ongoing challenges. However, there appears to be a subset of people for whom virtual care can be critically important to support accessible care. DSPs require more training and resources to effectively support virtual healthcare visits.