Building sustainable virtual healthcare delivery in Indigenous communities through capacity building: a case study

Abstract

Rural and northern Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan continue to face barriers in accessing timely and culturally safe healthcare. To address workforce shortages and digital exclusion, we co-developed a community-based virtual healthcare training initiative focused on building Indigenous-led capacity to support virtual care delivery within home communities. Grounded in Indigenous pedagogy and the Two-Eyed Seeing approach, this descriptive case study reports on the design, implementation, and synthesized experiential insights arising from early program delivery. Delivered in partnership with the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies (SIIT), the Virtual Health Hub Assistant Certificate Program equips Indigenous learners with both technical skills and cultural competencies to facilitate virtual care in their home communities. Training design was intentionally scaffolded to support digital confidence, relational accountability, and leadership development. Consistent with a community-engaged program evaluation approach, experiential reflections, informal feedback, and operational observations arising during program delivery were collaboratively documented and synthesized by program leads; no formal qualitative and quantitative data were collected, and no human participant data were generated. Graduates are now working or preparing to work within their own remote and rural communities, supporting virtual visits, improving workflow integration, and strengthening trust and patient comfort with digital health systems. Clinicians communicated increased efficiency, while learners expressed a sense of purpose, belonging, and local leadership. This report illustrates how Indigenous-led curriculum, community governance, and localized capacity-building can contribute to the sustainability of virtual care and advance digital health equity, while also identifying areas for future community-defined evaluation. Our experience underscores that ethical virtual care requires educators to centre community values, contextual knowledge, and long-term workforce development.