Co-Design of strategies to enhance access to Virtual Urgent Care models by equity-deserving populations

# Author summary

In 2020, Ontario rolled out virtual urgent care (VUC) to help people with minor health issues during the pandemic, but people from under-served communities, which may include people with disabilities, who are from a visible minority or who are from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, often struggle to access these services. To address this issue, an in-person meeting was organized where a diverse group of 35 participants from various backgrounds met to brainstorm strategies to improve access to VUC by under-served communities. The meeting attendees focused on key issues such as raising awareness about VUC, improving digital literacy, and making sure people find the service credible. The discussions revealed the barriers people from under-served communities face as well as highlighted opportunities to promote VUC as a culturally safe option for diverse communities. Overall, the event led to several ideas and insights on how to make VUC more inclusive and accessible for everyone.

# Specialty of this work

1. We prepared our team and co-hosted, with the Sunnybrook Research Team, a World Café approach to creating this inclusive consultative model of care.
2. This model refers to virtual urgent care for equity-deserving people.
3. It also proves our team’s recognition as a co-design specialist group in Community-Based Research.

# Impact

1. World Café is not a commonly used qualitative data collection approach and is unknown to many of the researchers
2. After that event, some of our partners became very interested in learning more from us about the modalities of World Café- a true social enterprise marketing approach.