Identifying barriers and facilitators to primary care practitioners implementing health assessments for people with...

People with intellectual disability experience poorer health outcomes compared with the general population, partly due to the difficulties of accessing preventive care in primary care settings. There is good evidence that structured annual health assessments can enhance quality of care for people with intellectual disability, and their use has become recommended policy in several high-income countries. However, uptake remains low. The Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) offers a conceptual structure for understanding barriers to implementation and has been usefully applied to inform implementation of health assessments for other high-need groups, but not for people with intellectual disability. We conducted a scoping review of the literature, using the TDF, to identify barriers and facilitators influencing primary care practitioners' implementation of annual health assessments for people with intellectual disability as part of routine primary care practice.

This study was conducted according to the JBI methodological approach for scoping reviews. Searches were conducted in Medline (OVID-SP), Embase (OVID-SP), PsycINFO (OVID-SP), CINHAL (EBSCO), Scopus (Elsevier) and Web of Science (Clarivate) for relevant peer-reviewed publications up to May 2023. Screening, full-text review and data extraction were completed by two independent reviewers. Data were extracted and mapped to the TDF to identify relevant barriers and facilitators.

The search yielded 1057 publications, with 21 meeting the inclusion criteria. Mapping data to the TDF, the most frequently identified domains were (a) environmental context and resources, (b) skills, (c) knowledge and (d) emotion. Predominant factors impacting on implementation included practitioners' lack of awareness about health assessments and their identified benefits; inadequate training and experience by practitioners in the delivery of health assessments for people with intellectual disability; insufficient time to provide health assessments; and practitioner burnout.

Using a theory-informed behavioural framework, our review aids understanding of the barriers and facilitators to improving the implementation of health assessments as part of routine care for people with intellectual disability. However, there is a clear need for further qualitative research to examine the perceptions of primary care practitioners regarding implementation barriers and facilitators to health assessments in general, including views from practitioners who are not currently undertaking health assessments.