Concept analyses on care and caring in nursing and midwifery: a scoping review protocol

The objective of this scoping review will be to synthesize the evidence elicited through concept analyses on the phenomena of care and caring as used in nursing and midwifery.

Care and caring are foundational concepts in nursing and midwifery. Concept analyses have been used to elicit how care and caring are understood from various perspectives and contexts. Despite the utility of these focused analyses in refining our understanding, a diverse and dispersed knowledge base can limit a synthesized and contemporary understanding of care and caring as concepts in nursing and midwifery.

The review will include concept analyses in which a recognized, structured process was applied to interrogate care and/or caring as the primary concepts of analysis in the context of nursing or midwifery.

The JBI scoping review methodology will be used. Key databases to be searched will include PubMed, CINAHL (EBSCOhost), SAGE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, and Google Scholar. Concept analyses spanning 2000-2025 will be included. Two reviewers will independently extract data to a predetermined extraction tool to map data and support the analysis. Descriptive content analysis will be used to support the narrative synthesis of the findings.

OSF https://osf.io/tncg2/.