Healthy work environments among health care professionals: a scoping review protocol

This scoping review will explore the breadth and types of evidence on healthy work environments (HWEs) worldwide for interprofessional multidisciplinary health care teams collaborating to provide direct patient care across clinical settings.

Enhancing work environments is a priority for health care systems to maintain adequate staffing, high-quality care, and workforce engagement. However, the literature on HWEs is fragmented and compartmentalized by discipline, making it difficult to compare findings or determine which elements are most effective across settings. Hence, health care leaders lack a comprehensive, interprofessional evidence base to guide HWE initiatives.

This review will include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods evidence on HWEs or conceptually aligned constructs. It will consider interprofessional health care team members with direct care responsibilities (eg, hands-on assessment, treatment, or support to patients; education for patient/family caregivers) in any clinical setting. Studies involving students or academic settings will be excluded.

This review will follow JBI methodology for scoping reviews. Searches will be conducted in CINAHL (EBSCOhost), PubMed, Embase (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), Scopus, LILACS, PEDro, and OTseeker. Gray literature, unpublished studies, and policy documents will be identified through ProQuest Central (ProQuest) and the websites of health organizations, professional associations, and government and regulatory agencies. The search will cover 2016 to the present, including materials in English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Korean. Two reviewers will independently screen titles, abstracts, and full-text articles. Data charting will follow a structured, AI-assisted workflow with rigorous human verification. Results will be presented descriptively with tables, charts, and a narrative summary.

OSF osf.io/gjze4.