Table 4.

Selection of respondent quotes by subtheme for qualitative Theme 3

THEME 3: Preparing practitioners to deliver psychological support remotely	Subtheme 3.1: Practitioner competencies for remote delivery
	I think there are ways to find around it, like you can plan ahead. “OK, I need to make sure my head is in the screen,” or “I need to make sure I have a solid background and not alcohol in the back.” Or even if you know that your kids are around, to at least just say, “Hey, by the way, today my kids are kind of in and out.”
	…know when to stop, when to pause, when to make a sign so that the person does not feel that he is speaking [just] to speak. Not just keep quiet, but at least make a sudden “uhm” gesture with my hands… Suddenly my hands interact so that the person feels that I am listening, only that sometimes before I did not do that, and only I spoke.
	Safety and security, I mean trustworthy environment or privacy. I try to ensure, before starting the session, by informing [the client] about the process and…maintaining privacy…I ask them…is there any possibility to break…if someone came or who is not aware about the session, at that moment what to do…And then, like, usually, we use a symbol so that I can understand that someone is going to bring someone in, something is interrupting or trying to interrupt the session.
	Subtheme 3.2: Use of role plays to prepare for remote delivery
	[The first role play] made me very nervous…because there was an unknown person sitting in front of me and I was like … how can I help him?
	…role plays have us more or less prepared for a moment that is going to be real and people who need us to be present to respond to their problems. I am a shy person and role play helps me to have confidence by gaining experience simulating those situations that we have not yet experienced.
	I think we have to focus more on the learning process and using role plays for these scenarios, because you haven’t experienced them as you would experience in real life, right? So, in normal education you’re just thrown into all of it– a whole host of different types of things. And, so, maybe a few role plays you’re good at for an unusual situation. But the remote area, it’s relatively new, and so we need role plays, we need scenarios to get that same coverage, because we don’t have years and years of being patients ourselves and clients ourselves on the one end of it and we don’t have that kind of like medical team or mental health team experience.
	Subtheme 3.3: Key role play scenarios and safety concerns
	The thing that I liked most is…sometimes there is an unpredictable situation through the client … like a real case scenario … Because these are not the things that can be experimented within clinical trials…. because this is part of treatment … so trainers acted like clients and then we practiced with them … that part was good.
	This [role play scenario], for me, was very beneficial because that way I can collaborate with the community, help them in the way that I have been able to develop myself and what I have learned is to promote hope for change. Even more so at this time, because many people, like in the [role play] interactions with the actresses, many are now going through difficult times due to the COVID disease, then they have different anguish problems. So, in that way, it allows me to help them.
	…a little bit more in terms of how to set up my camera or you know my body language, how I want to be looking at the person, you know how to make eye contact remotely, right? Like kind of all these things that would be more natural if we were in person, so I think the role plays help me at least try some of those things out.