This project is a community-led collaboration between an interdisciplinary research team (including Indigenous and visible minority academics, health professionals and students working in health, and community disaster researchers) and First Nation leadership and community members. The project addresses two critical issues that affect Indigenous, visible minorities, and refugee communities: negatively impact their health and poor access to healthcare.

We will examine how ethnic and cultural identity, protective factors, and psycho-social stresses impact this pandemic. Given the growing ethnically diverse population of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, it is essential to understand how these communities view, use, and experience health services to build their health resiliency. The findings will provide a high reward policy and programming recommendations to improve health services and deliver equitable, quality and ethnically conscious care during the COVID-19 disaster. Following relational, Indigenous, and antiracist theoretical frameworks, we will use a mixed-method approach of self-reported surveys, focus groups, individual interviews, and Indigenous story-sharing to collect data from the Indigenous, visible minorities, and refugee communities’ overall health, factors that negatively impact their health, how they cope with adversity, and their usage of health services.