Introduction:

Technological advances have democratized the use of the Internet, which has caused the need for digital competence in health professionals, in view of enhancing their capabilities and improving in all branches of health services, human health and population welfare, aspects that should be considered in professional training.

Objective:

To describe the digital competences of health sciences professionals.

Methods:

A descriptive literature review was conducted in specialized bibliographic databases (PubMed, Science Direct, Dialnet, SciELO, ProQuest, Latindex), the Virtual Health Library (VHL), and scientific journals (Educación Médica Superior), from April 2011 to December 2021.

Results:

Out of 1431 articles, 21 were selected, which permitted to obtain six categories: information and information literacy, communication and collaboration, technical use and safety, digital content creation, problem solving, and factors related to digital competence.

Conclusions:

Health sciences professionals present deficiencies in the competences of information and information literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, as well as technical use and safety. However, they present more skills in problem solving; these are associated with factors in which males are more competent than females and there is an inverse correlation by which the greater the competence, the younger the health professionals are.