Patient engagement in the development and implementation of navigation services: a scoping review protocol

Patient navigation, a complex health intervention meant to address widespread fragmentation across the healthcare landscape, has been widely adopted internationally. This rapid uptake in patient navigation has led to a broadening of the service's reach to include those of different social positions and different health conditions. Despite the popularity and prevalence of patient navigation programmes, the extent of patient involvement and/or partnership in their construction has yet to be articulated. This scoping review will explore and describe the extent to which patients have been engaged in the development and/or implementation of patient navigation programmes to date.

This scoping review will adhere to the Arksey and O'Malley framework for conducting scoping reviews. The electronic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, PsycINFO, SocINDEX and Scopus were searched in September 2023 using terms related to patient navigation and programme implementation. Inclusion criteria stipulate that the studies must: (1) include an intervention labelled as 'navigation' in a healthcare setting and (2) describe patient engagement in the design, development and/or implementation process of said patient navigation programme. To assess study eligibility, two reviewers will independently read through the titles and abstracts, followed by the full texts, of each study identified from the search strategy to determine whether they meet inclusion criteria. Reviewers will then extract data from the included studies, present descriptive study characteristics in tables, and perform qualitative content analysis.

This review does not require ethics approval as data will be collated exclusively from peer-reviewed articles and thesis dissertations. A manuscript summarising the results of the review will be written and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication. The review will map aspects of programme development that have repeatedly utilised patient perspectives and areas where engagement has lagged. This review will also depict how patient engagement varies across programme characteristics.