Mental Health and Addiction Care Professionals' Views on Artificial Intelligence Integration in Oman: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

To explore mental health and addiction care professionals' views on integrating artificial intelligence into clinical practice at a tertiary psychiatric hospital.

A qualitative descriptive study.

Purposive sampling recruited 17 nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, translated from Arabic into English, and analysed through codebook-based thematic analysis informed by Braun and Clarke's six phases.

Four themes were identified: variable familiarity with artificial intelligence (AI); actual experience with artificial intelligence and non-artificial-intelligence digital technologies, with telemedicine and electronic health records more common than AI-specific tools; anticipated benefits involving efficiency, clinical decision support, communication, data management, and service access; and anticipated barriers concerning infrastructure, resources, training, clinical suitability, therapeutic relationships, and ethics.

Participants were cautiously optimistic but had limited direct clinical experience and sometimes conflated AI with other digital technologies. Safe implementation requires a shared understanding of AI, reliable infrastructure, role-specific education, ethical governance, accountable human oversight, and protection of therapeutic relationships.

No patients or members of the public were involved in the design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, or reporting of this study. The participants were healthcare professionals.