Graduate and undergraduate medical curricula that address the needs of people who experience homelessness: a scoping review protocol [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]

Background: The impact that increased homelessness has on the healthcare system should be of great concern to medical providers and the institutions that train them. While the demand for medical providers who understand the healthcare needs of homeless individuals is high, traditional medical curricula do not adequately address this.

Objectives: This scoping review aims to examine published undergraduate and graduate medical curricula that address the healthcare needs of homeless individuals to support the development and evaluation of homeless healthcare curricula globally.

Methods: This paper will utilise Arksey & O’Malley’s framework for scoping reviews to ensure a systematic scoping review. Research will be conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute's (JBI) Updated Methodological Guidance for the Conduct of Scoping Reviews and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses Extension for Scoping Review (PRISMA-ScR). Due to financial and time constraints, only articles published after 2000 and written in English will be reviewed. A comprehensive search strategy will be developed that includes searches in PubMed, Scopus, Embase and CINAHL with additional hand-searching of key articles. Each article will be screened independently by two reviewers. A third reviewer will resolve any disagreements. Data extraction will begin with a pre-defined extraction form (Extended Data File 3) and will be subsequently analysed with JBI’s current guidelines on inductive approaches to qualitative content analysis.

Conclusion: Research findings will be distributed to individuals who oversee the university’s medical curricula at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences. Discussions will be held to assess opportunities for the implementation/integration of homeless healthcare curricula. Furthermore, these findings will be disseminated globally to healthcare providers and administrators at conferences, hospitals and clinics.