Evaluations of clinical practice guidelines, protocols, and pathways used in rural and remote Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: The objective of this review protocol is to scope the extent and type of evidence describing evaluations of clinical practice guidelines, protocols, and pathways that are used in the rural and remote areas of Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Introduction: Given the important role that clinical guidance resources can play in minimizing health disparities, it will be useful to understand what resources are being used in rural and remote health contexts and how these are being developed, implemented, and evaluated.

Inclusion criteria: Records will be included from 3 high-income countries which have rural or remote regions and First Nations populations. Records will only be included if they explicitly identify the clinical guidance resource, have the resource as a primary focus of the evaluation, and show that the resource has been endorsed or implemented for use in the rural or remote health service. Evaluations of point-of-care testing instruments will be excluded, as well as records from aged care facilities, even if they are from rural and remote areas.

Methods: The JBI methodology for scoping reviews will be followed. Searches will be conducted in MEDLINE (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCOhost), Emcare (Ovid), Scopus, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, and Google. Records in English will be considered for inclusion. Covidence will be used to remove duplicates and organize the selection review process. Data will be extracted using a data charting tool created by the authors. The results will be analyzed using simple descriptive statistics and presented as a series of tables and a narrative summary.

Review registration: The review has been registered on Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6EM32.