The PAVC project aims to address the needs of people in linguistically diverse communities and are interested in receiving care virtually.
The Partnering for Appropriate Virtual Care (PAVC) collaborative is developing a resource that will focus on the needs of individuals who speak a language other than English or are Deaf or Hard of Hearing and would like to receive care virtually.
The resource will outline safe, high quality and culturally sensitive virtual health interactions between health care teams and community members, including patients, families and caregivers.
Our project team aims to create a PHSA-wide resource that will guide best practices for virtual health visits, particularly when language services are needed for accessing information or communicating in a health care setting.
Despite the rise in linguistically diverse communities across B.C., there is a lack of focus on equitable language access across the health care system. As a result, our community members and health care staff often encounter great challenges due to language barriers when receiving or providing care.
Through our project and deliverables, we aim to specifically address the needs of linguistically diverse communities who have a language other than English and are interested to receive care virtually.
It is important for this initiative to be informed by those with lived and living experiences. With that in mind, this project is co-led by a patient partner and a language access lead from the Provincial Language Services language access lead, who is a member of the Deaf, Deaf-Blind and Hard of Hearing (DDBHH) community.
Additionally, the project working group includes patient partner representation from the following language constituencies:
- Francophone
- Spanish
- Indigenous DDBHH community
We want to ensure the resource(s) we develop include voices of those who are directly involved in receiving and providing virtual care. For this reason, our planning efforts will be informed by engagement with health care teams –including providers and administration staff – and community members.
We thank participants who provided valuable feedback in our 2024 survey.
The patient survey was made available in the six most-accessed languages: American Sign Language (ASL), French, Spanish, Punjabi, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
