Changes in work tasks and organization of general practice in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic: results from a comparative international study

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to huge and rapid changes in general practice in Norway as in the rest of Europe. This paper aims to explore to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic changed the work tasks and organization of Norwegian general practice. Material and method: We analysed data from the Norwegian part of the international, cross-sectional PRICOV-19 study, collecting data from general practice via an online self-reported questionnaire. We included 130 Norwegian general practices, representing an estimated 520 Norwegian general practitioners (GPs). All Norwegian GPs were invited to participate. In the analyses, we focused on items related to the use of alternatives to face-to-face consultations, changes in the workload, tasks and delegated responsibilities of both the GPs and other personnel in the GP offices, adaptations in routines related to hygiene measures, triage of patients, and how the official rules and recommendations affected the practices. Results: There was a large and significant increase in the use of all forms of alternative consultation forms (digital text-based, video- and telephone consultations). The use of several different infection prevention measures were significantly increased, and the provision of hand sanitizer to patients increased from 29.6% pre-pandemic to 95.1% since the pandemic. More than half of the GPs (59.5%) reported that their responsibilities in the practice had increased, and 41% were happy with the task shift. 27% felt that they received adequate support from the government; however, 20% reported that guidelines from the government posed a threat to the well-being of the practice staff. We found no associations with the rurality of the practice location or size of the municipalities. Conclusion: Norwegian GPs adapted well to the need for increased use of alternatives to face-to-face consultations and reported a high acceptance of their increased responsibilities. However, only one in four received adequate support from the government, which is an important learning point for similar situations in the future.publishedVersio