Rural access and staff technology support are the standing barriers to hospital-at-home, Canadian workshops find

A national, cross-stakeholder qualitative study ran five virtual workshops across Canada between January and June 2025, bringing together healthcare providers, patients, carers and administrators to discuss hospital-at-home care. Three themes emerged: making hospital-at-home work for health systems, for the people delivering and receiving it, and better in future. Participants named technology support for staff, managing the workload placed on providers and carers, and ensuring access for rural and remote communities as the standing unresolved issues — alongside genuinely high reported satisfaction with hospital-at-home care overall.

Synthesis As a qualitative workshop series, this study describes stakeholder priorities and concerns rather than measuring a clinical or cost outcome, and its findings are specific to the Canadian systems and communities represented in the workshops. Its value is in independently naming the same constraints — digital exclusion, and the capacity of unpaid and professional carers — that recur across this evidence base whenever a home-based or remote care model is evaluated for who it actually reaches.

For services designing or expanding hospital-at-home provision into rural or dispersed populations, this is evidence that staff technology support and carer capacity need to be treated as first-order design requirements from the outset, not issues to resolve once a model is already running.