Health promotion interventions to increase cervical cancer screening uptake in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol

Abstract

Introduction: Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women and approximately 500,000 new cases are diagnosed yearly. It is increasingly imperative to use effective methods of early detection and initialization of treatment for cervical cancer especially among women from vulnerable poor communities through the initiation of effective health promotion interventions. This study will coalesce the sporadic, and uncoordinated interventions that have been used by researchers to give a single unit that describes and assess the most effective means of health promotion interventions. Methods: The PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) scoping review methodology will be used to guide the reporting of this scoping review. The three-step search strategy for scoping reviews will be adopted to electronically search databases such as PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL via EBSCOhost), Web of Science, and EMBASE. After search completion, the citations of the articles will be imported to EndNote X9 (version 1.19.6) reference manager for screening, removal of duplicates, and storage. Two of the researchers (AA, KDK) will independently screen the titles and abstracts in accordance with the inclusion criteria specified in this protocol. The proposed review will consider primary published peer-review articles published articles in English language from 2010-2021. Data extracted from selected studies will include author(s), publication year, country, research design and aim, study population, interventions, outcome measure, and major findings. The JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist for Systematic Reviews and Research Syntheses will be used to assess the quality of the included articles.Discussion: We envisage that the findings from this review will firstly identify the various types of interventions implemented in the sub-Saharan African countries to increase the uptake of cervical cancer screening. Secondly, the findings will provide an overview of the outcome measures and identify effective interventions implemented in all the studies to increase cervical cancer uptake in SSA. Finally, the review will guide future research in developing, implementing, and evaluating appropriate health promotion interventions tailored towards increasing cervical cancer screening uptake.Scoping review registration: The review has been registered in the Open Science Framework with the registration number (osf.io/yad46)