Experiences of nurses working in novel virtual care centres in the Netherlands: a qualitative study

Abstract Background Virtual care centres (VCCs) are novel wards of hospitals and facilitate the provision of remote monitoring and home-based patient care. Whereas since the COVID-19 pandemic VCCs have rapidly emerged, there is no standardised framework for the development and implementation of VCCs. To develop such a framework, insight in current experiences of employment in VCCs is needed. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore nurses' perceptions and experiences of working in VCCs. Results Between February and July 2023, semi-structured online interviews were conducted with thirteen nurses (age 45 ± 8 years) from four VCCs in the Netherlands. Interviews were thematically analysed using a six-stage approach, yielding six themes of nurses’ perceptions and experiences of working in VCCs: 1)' Changing role of nurses', especially in the patient-professional relationship, transformation of care and communication; 2)’Clinical perspective of nurses’, need for general medical knowledge and use of data in relation to nurses’ clinical perspective, 3)‘Education and training’, need to keep nurses’ knowledge up-to-date and create time for education; 4)'Organisation of care', nurses’ role in the development of protocols and need for sufficient technological preconditions; 5)‘Cooperation with other healthcare professionals’, consisted of the collaboration with and needed support by other healthcare professionals to organize and provide care to VCC patients; 6)'Experienced effects of VCCs' included advantages and disadvantages of VCCs for the nurses, patients and the hospital. Themes were mapped onto the Capability, Opportunity and Motivation of Behaviour (COM-B) model where all themes included components of capability, opportunity and motivation. Conclusions Our findings highlight the importance of considering COM-B components of nurses' work in VCCs. Due to the changing roles of nurses in VCCs, there are evolving educational needs in to communicate with patients and colleagues, and the use of data to support their clinical view, as well as providing technological optimisations to further support nurses' work and the VCCs.