Introduction

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to the personal and work lives of all Canadian health care professionals. The only option for many Nurses Specialized in Wound, Ostomy, and Continence (NSWOCs) to continue to provide support and direction to clients with wounds, ostomies, and continence challenges was through virtual care.

Most NSWOCs and many health care organizations / employers lacked experience in this method of providing care; furthermore, systems to support both the client and the health care professionals were not in place. Canadian NSWOCs developed a way to support their clients. We learned a lot individually and collectively, from protecting client privacy and information to gathering pertinent data without seeing a client in person.

In the fall of 2022, a group of NSWOCs interested in virtual care came together to develop this toolkit to assist Canadian NSWOCs to safely provide virtual care in their practices. No longer are NSWOCs required to figure it out as they go, as many had done in 2020.

The NSWOCC Virtual Care Toolkit is divided into five sections: Legal and Regulatory Considerations, Technology, Equity-Oriented Care, Delivery of Virtual Care, and Knowledge Transfer. Within each section, considerations for virtual care are highlighted, and suggestions for addressing these concerns are included. Much of the available literature in the realm of virtual care relates to wound care. The advice offered here for ostomy and continence virtual care is largely the expert opinion of the task force. We have chosen to use the term client throughout meaning a “recipient of care: in the community-client, in residential care-resident, and in acute care-patient.”