Collaborative practice competencies needed for telehealth delivery by health and social care professionals: a scoping review.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare and social services professionals have had to provide services through virtual care. In the workplace, such professionals often need to be sufficiently resourced to collaborate and address collaborative care barriers in telehealth. We performed a scoping review to identify the competencies required to support interprofessional collaboration among clinicians in telehealth. We followed Arksey and O'Malley's and the Joanna Briggs Institute's methodological guidelines, including quantitative and qualitative peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2021. We expanded our data sources by searching for any organization or experts in the field via Google. The analysis of the resulting thirty-one studies and sixteen documents highlighted that health and social services professionals are generally unaware of the competencies they need to develop or maintain interprofessional collaboration in telehealth. In an era of digital innovations, we believe this gap may jeopardize the quality of the services offered to patients and needs to be addressed. Of the six competency domains in the National Interprofessional Competency Framework, it was observed that interprofessional conflict resolution was the competency that emerged least as an essential competency to be developed, while interprofessional communication and patient/client/family/community-centered care were identified as the two most reported essential competencies.

The COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Needs Experienced by Indigenous People in Urban Areas

The world was caught off guard by the swift spread of the COVID19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020. For vulnerable populations such as the urban Indigenous, the first wave of the pandemic was even more challenging, for multiple reasons. Because many of their usual culturally safe services were interrupted, they found themselves struggling on different levels. Our team conducted a needs assessment to shed light on how urban Indigenous people living in the Saugenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region in the province of Quebec, Canada, dealt with this situation, and what holistic health services they most wished they could have relied on. To respect Indigenous culture, data collection was completed through sharing circles in addition to a web-based survey. The results indicated that participants experienced anxiety and psychological distress during the pandemic. They identified unmet needs related to family services, support in homeschooling, access to traditional medicine, and spiritual and cultural practices, among others. Future work should involve the implementation of culturally safe services, adapted to the pandemic era, for Indigenous people living in urban areas.