Grappling with the ‘human' problem hiding behind the technology: Telehealth during and beyond COVID-19

1. Telehealth (online videoconferencing) has been used successfully with a range of adolescents and young adults (AYA) to access outpatient, clinical psychology services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.2. Our combined, recent clinical experiences demonstrate a range of potentially sensitive clinical interactions with young people and their families can be successfully delivered and experienced using telehealth. 3. The relative lack of uptake in telehealth prior to COVID-19 requires clinicians and researchers to consider the barriers that prevented its use. 4. We argue that a key, lesser-acknowledged, barrier is the contention that telehealth is not capable of transmitting the ‘human-ness’ required to support effective interactions within psychosocial clinical care.5. Telehealth preferences cannot be assumed for any patient/client demographic; to advance telehealth beyond COVID-19 clinical research needs to find new ways to rigorously capture and evaluate these critical experiential and relational aspects to telehealth-delivered care.