General practitioners' and women's experiences of perimenopause consultations: A qualitative evidence synthesis protocol.

Background: Perimenopause precedes menopause and can cause a myriad of symptoms for women. General practitioners (GPs) are frequently the first contact for perimenopausal women with symptoms. However, women express feeling dissatisfied with the consultations they have with their GPs for perimenopausal symptoms. Moreover, diagnostic difficulties can make these consultations challenging for GPs. Despite these challenges, research to date has focused on menopause, not the transition to menopause. To date, no evidence synthesis has examined how women experience perimenopause consultations, nor how GPs experience providing care to these women.

Objective: To systematically search, collate, and appraise the qualitative literature to understand general practitioners' and women's experiences of perimenopause consultations and examine how treatment decisions are made during consultations.

Methods: A meta-ethnography will be conducted following Sattar et al. (2021) guidelines for conducting a meta-ethnography as developed by Noblit and Hare (1988). Seven databases will be systematically searched. To be included, studies must report on the experiences of either general practitioners and/or perimenopausal women and published since 2014 to capture the most up-to-date evidence. Quality assessment will be conducted using CASP (Critical Appraisal Skills Programme) tools. A GRADE-CERqual (Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research) will be conducted to assess the confidence of the findings. PROSPERO registration number CRD42024520537.

Discussion: Findings will provide new and useful insight into how GPs and women experience consultations for perimenopause and how decisions are made during these consultations.