Online health literacy resources for people with intellectual disability: protocol for a grey literature scoping...

People with intellectual disability are at risk of poor physical and mental health. Risks to health are compounded by poor health literacy, that is, reduced capacity to access health services, respond quickly to changes in health status and navigate care pathways. Building health literacy skills is a strength-based way to increase health and optimise the use of healthcare services. The internet is a primary source of health information for many people, including people with intellectual disability and their families. This scoping review will aim to identify and collate online lay healthcare resources available to and developed for people with intellectual disability and their families and evaluate whether domains of health literacy are addressed.

This review will be reported following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews guidelines. The proposed search strategy has three components. Resources will be identified by (1) reviewing disability organisation websites, (2) searching key disability and health terms in the Google search engine and (3) snowball sampling to identify additional resources through links in identified websites and resources. Resources will be selected if they are freely available, presented in or translatable into English, provide health information and are directed to people with intellectual disability or their family members. Extracted data will include descriptors of the source, format, area of health and targeted age range. Content relevant to domains of health literacy will be documented and gaps in available health information will be identified. Study findings will be presented in narrative, tabular and visual forms.

Ethical approval will not be sought because primary data will not be collected. The results will be disseminated in peer-reviewed literature, as conference presentations, as a synthesised resource for people with intellectual disability and their families and in summary documents for health service managers and policymakers.