Retention of doctors in emergency medicine: a scoping review protocol

The primary question of the review is: What is known about retention of doctors in emergency medicine?

There is a staffing crisis in emergency medicine and retention problems across healthcare. The evidence is disparate and includes healthcare research, management studies and policy documents from government and other agencies. Therefore there is a need to map the evidence on retention of emergency medicine doctors. This review is part of a wider study of the retention of doctors in emergency medicine situated in the UK.

We will identify papers relating to emergency medicine doctors at all levels, using the different terms used internationally for these practitioners. We will exclude papers relating to other healthcare professions. We aim to include papers relating to retention; to identify these our search will include terms such as turnover and exodus. The setting is focused on the emergency department; studies focusing on working in other settings, for example, a minor injuries unit, will be excluded. Studies from any country will be included; however, we are limited to those published in English.

We will search medical literature databases including MEDLINE, Embase, HMIC, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the British Medical Journal collection. We will supplement this by searching business and management journals including Business Source Complete, ProQuest Business Database and Emerald Business and Management Journals. A structured iterative search of the gray literature will be conducted. Retrieved papers will be screened for inclusion by two reviewers. Data will be extracted and presented in tabular form and a narrative summary that align with the review's objective.