Engaging Stakeholders and Planning for the Implementation of Virtual Care Competencies within Mental Health Care

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a rapid transition to virtual care across Canada. However, research indicates that health care providers often felt under-prepared to make the transition to virtual practice. As virtual care becomes a mainstay of practice, there is an urgent need to develop education and training resources to ensure a workforce that is both confident and competent to provide mental health care virtually. Preliminary results indicate that efforts are underway to develop discipline-specific virtual care competencies. However, there is a lack of consensus on the virtual mental health care competencies required for interprofessional care teams. Moreover, virtual care competency frameworks rarely address the transdisciplinary training needs of professionals working in mental health contexts. As a result, our project objectives are twofold: The first goal (1) is to disseminate our virtual mental health competency framework, designed collaboratively with health professionals in mental health contexts. The second goal (2) is to leverage stakeholder input to plan for the implementation of the virtual mental health competency framework in health professions education and curriculum support. The competency framework emerging from this grant will serve as the foundation for future development and expansion of virtual care curriculum modules and virtual learning resources to further support virtual mental health care capacity building across Canada.