Understanding surgical disease and care for Māori in Aotearoa: protocol for a scoping review

Māori continue to experience inequitable healthcare and health outcomes compared with other New Zealanders. A narrative review conducted in 2016 described disparities in access to and through the surgical care pathway for Māori from a limited pool of small retrospective cohort studies. This review only targeted studies that specifically investigated surgical care for Māori; however, many other studies have performed subanalyses for Māori as part of bigger ethnographic epidemiological studies and Indigenous health has become more topical in Australasia since this review was conducted. Health disparities and inequities in surgical care for Māori are still not well understood. This scoping review aims to report the nature and extent of disparities in surgical disease and care for Māori.

A scoping review will be performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews Checklist. This study will be informed by Kaupapa Māori research methodology. Electronic searches of PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature Plus will be performed between 19 February and 19 March 2022. Two authors will independently identify and retrieve relevant texts in an iterative manner and examine how responsive each of the included studies are to Māori using the recently described Māori framework-a framework designed to guide researcher responsiveness to Māori.

Ethical approval has not been sought as our review will only include published and publicly accessible data. We will publish the review in an open access peer-reviewed surgical journal. This protocol has been registered in Open Science Framework (10.17605/OSF.IO/NP4H3).