Allied health assistants in the Australian workforce: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: The objective of this review is to identify and map the available literature on how allied health assistants are utilized in Australia.

Introduction: Allied health assistants have the potential to increase service delivery output for the allied health workforce; however, barriers to successful implementation remain across allied health contexts. Identifying and mapping the clinical contexts in which relevant literature exists can i) identify the scope of parameters defining the allied health assistant role specific to practice contexts/settings and ii) inform development of evidence-based training for both allied health professional and assistant programs.

Inclusion criteria: This review will include peer-reviewed and gray literature in which allied health assistant services are implemented. Literature that deals with supervision, organizational planning, and therapeutic outcomes will be considered for inclusion.

Methods: The review will follow the JBI methodology for scoping reviews and will be reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). CINAHL Ultimate (EBSCOhost), MEDLINE with Full Text (EBSCOhost), Health and Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health (Gale Onefile), Scopus, Web of Science, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (ProQuest) will be systematically searched for published research. We will also hand-search reference lists from relevant papers and sources of gray literature. The review will include work based in Australia and published in English with full-text availability. Findings will be presented graphically to support visual analysis, accompanied by a narrative summary.

Review registration: Open Science Framework https://osf.io/mhb4v.