# Bringing together conceptualisations of the health advocacy competence across the continuum of medical education: a scoping review protocol

## TL;DR

This study aims to clarify how health advocacy is understood and taught in medical education by reviewing existing literature.

## Contribution

The study provides a systematic scoping review protocol to map and analyze conceptualizations of health advocacy across medical education.

## Key findings

- A scoping review protocol is developed to clarify health advocacy conceptual dimensions in medical education.
- The review will use JBI methodology and include literature from multiple databases without restrictions.
- Findings will be shared through peer-reviewed journals and conferences to support HA integration in education.

## Abstract

Health advocacy (HA) is acknowledged as a core competence in medical education. However, varying and sometimes conflicting conceptualisations of HA exist, making it challenging to integrate the competence consistently. While this diversity highlights the need for a deeper understanding of HA conceptualisations, a comprehensive analysis across the continuum of medical education is absent in the literature. This protocol has been developed to clarify the conceptual dimensions of the HA competence in literature as applied to medical education.

The review will be conducted in line with the JBI (formerly Joanna Briggs Institute) methodology for scoping reviews. A comprehensive literature search was developed and already carried out in eight academic databases and Google Scholar, without restrictions on publication date, geography or language. Articles that describe the HA role among students and physicians who receive or provide medical education will be eligible for inclusion. Two independent reviewers will independently complete title and abstract screening prior to full-text review of selected articles and data extraction on the final set. A descriptive-analytical approach will be applied for summarising the data.

This scoping review does not involve human participants, as all evidence is sourced from publicly available databases. Therefore, ethical approval is not required for this study. The findings from this scoping review will be disseminated through submission to a high-quality peer-reviewed journal and presented at academic conferences. By clarifying the conceptualisations of HA, this review aims to contribute to a shared narrative that will strengthen the foundation for integrating the HA role into medical education.

A preliminary version of this protocol was registered on the Open Science Framework on 9 December 2024, and can be accessed at the following link: https://osf.io/ed2br. We have also registered our scoping review protocol as a preprint at medRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.09.24318699.