Mental health clinicians’ perceptions and perceived challenges about recommending mental health apps to patients in Ethiopia

Mobile health apps are becoming increasingly popular and are viewed as supplementary aids that simplify healthcare tasks, facilitate patient follow-up, monitor patient symptoms, and support self-care. Their utility may be essential in low-resource countries including Ethiopia. However, their accessibility, availability, trustworthiness, and credibility were identified as the main perceived challenges when recommending the app to patients. To explore mental healthcare professionals’ perceptions and perceived challenges about mental health apps for patients with depression and anxiety. Two focus group discussions were conducted with mental healthcare professionals (n = 14) from February 10–20, 2024, at Amanuel Mental Specialized Hospital in Ethiopia. The collected audio-recorded data were transcribed into text, coded, and then exported to NVivo version 14 for analysis. A total of 14 multi-disciplinary mental health professionals participated in focus group discussions. The first focus group consisted of 8 study participants, and the second focus group comprised 6 participants. Most of the interviewed health professionals (12) were male. Four main themes were identified: (1) perceived benefit (improvement of patients’ well-being and mental health accessibility), (2) perceived alleviation of healthcare work burden, (3) perceived challenges (usability, accessibility, trustworthiness, credibility and effectiveness), and (4) suggested app features (psychoeducational, self-assessment and self-monitoring, self-care, multimedia and reminders). The involvement of mental health professionals is vital for the successful development of mobile mental health apps. App features such as psychoeducational, self-assessment, self-monitoring, self-care, multimedia, and reminders received positive feedback from healthcare professionals. However, participants expressed and perceived challenges about the app’s accessibility, availability, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and credibility.