Video Calls as a Replacement for Family Visits During Lockdowns in Aged Care: Interview Study With Family Members
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Lockdowns have been used to prevent the spread of transmissible illnesses such as influenza, norovirus, and COVID-19 in care homes. However, lockdowns deny care home residents supplemental care and the socioemotional enrichment that comes from seeing family members. Video calling has the potential to enable ongoing contact between residents and family members during lockdowns. However, video calls can be considered by some as a poor substitute for in-person visits. It is important to understand family members' experiences with video calling during lockdowns to ensure the effective use of this technology in the future. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to understand how family members use video calls to communicate with relatives living in aged care during lockdowns. We focused on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved extensive lockdowns in aged care homes. METHODS: We conducted semistructured interviews with 18 adults who had been using video calls with relatives living in aged care during pandemic lockdowns. The interviews focused on how participants had been using video calls, what benefits they gained from video-based interactions, and what challenges they encountered when using the technology. We analyzed the data using the 6-phase reflexive approach to thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke. RESULTS: We developed 4 themes through our analysis. Theme 1 interprets video calling as a medium for the continuation of care during lockdowns. Using video calls, family members were able to provide social enrichment for residents and engaged in health monitoring to uphold residents' welfare. Theme 2 highlights how video calling extended care by supporting frequent contact, transmitting nonverbal cues that were essential for communication, and negating the need for face masks. Theme 3 interprets organizational issues such as the lack of technology and staff time as impediments to the continuation of familial care through video. Finally, theme 4 highlights the need for 2-way communication, interpreting residents' unfamiliarity with video calling and their health conditions as further barriers to the continuation of care. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that, during restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, video calls became a medium for enabling family members to continue participating in the care of their relatives. The use of video calls to continue care illustrates their value for families during times of mandatory lockdown and supports the use of video to complement face-to-face visits at other times. However, better support is needed for video calling in aged care homes. This study also revealed a need for video calling systems that are designed for the aged care context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".