School health initiatives in low-income and middle-income countries: a scoping review protocol

Schools are key settings for implementing school health initiatives to prevent health problems facing learners. Initiatives exist to help learners build health literacy, adopt positive behaviours and improve their health and academic outcomes. Yet, school health outcomes have not been achieved in many settings, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. This failure is attributed to mismatches between the initiatives and the problems being addressed, or the ill implementation of school health initiatives. Mapping these initiatives to school health problems and other school health characteristics is essential to fully understand and achieve the desired school health outcomes.

This study will map literature on school health initiatives with other characteristics from 2013 to 2025. We will search articles in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. Two reviewers will independently screen records and chart data; disagreements will be resolved by consensus and, when needed, adjudicated by a third reviewer. Analysis will include a qualitative review of key concepts in school health and a quantitative analysis of all included studies based on the main text categories and themes from the qualitative phase.

Ethics approval is not required because this study is a scoping review of published literature and does not involve human participants. The results will be published as an article in a peer-reviewed journal and presented to stakeholders involved in implementing school health initiatives.