School of Public Health, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
Tamale Teaching Hospital, Tamale, Ghana.
BMJ Open. 2024 Jun 5;14(6):e082757. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2023-082757.
The surge of public health emergencies over the past decade has disproportionately affected sub-Saharan Africa. These include outbreaks of infectious diseases such as Ebola, Monkeypox and COVID-19. Experience has shown that community participation is key to the successful implementation of infection control activities. Despite the pivotal role community engagement plays in epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response activities, strategies to engage communities have been underexplored to date, particularly in sub-Sahara Africa. Furthermore, reviews conducted have not included evidence from the latest pandemic, COVID-19. This scoping review aims to address these gaps by documenting through available literature, the strategies for community engagement for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response in sub-Sahara Africa.
We will use the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews and the methodological framework for scoping reviews from Arksey and O'Malley to guide the review. Two reviewers will develop a systematic search strategy to identify articles published from January 2014 to date. We will retrieve peer-reviewed research published in the English language from databases including Embase, EBSCO-host, PubMed, Global Health, CINAHL, Google Scholar and Web of Science. Additionally, we will search for relevant grey literature from the websites of specific international organisations, public health institutes and Government Ministries of Health in African countries. After the removal of duplicates, the two reviewers will independently screen all titles, abstracts and full articles to establish the relevance of each study for inclusion in the review. We will extract data from the included articles using a data extraction tool and present the findings in tabular form with an accompanying narrative to aid comprehension.
Ethical approval is not required for the conduct of scoping reviews. We plan to disseminate the findings from this review through publications in a peer-reviewed journal, presentations at conferences and meetings with policy-makers.
过去十年，公共卫生突发事件呈激增态势，尤其对撒哈拉以南非洲地区影响较大。其中包括埃博拉、猴痘和 COVID-19 等传染病的爆发。经验表明，社区参与是成功实施感染控制活动的关键。尽管社区参与在传染病和大流行病的预防和应对活动中发挥了关键作用，但迄今为止，针对社区参与的策略仍未得到充分探索，特别是在撒哈拉以南非洲地区。此外，以往的综述并未纳入最新大流行病 COVID-19 的证据。本范围综述旨在通过现有文献记录撒哈拉以南非洲传染病和大流行病预防和应对中的社区参与策略来解决这些空白。
我们将使用系统评价和荟萃分析扩展的首选报告项目和阿斯基和奥马利的方法框架来指导综述。两名审查员将制定系统搜索策略，以确定自 2014 年 1 月以来发表的文章。我们将从包括 Embase、EBSCO-host、PubMed、全球健康、CINAHL、谷歌学术和 Web of Science 在内的数据库中检索以英语发表的同行评议研究。此外，我们将从特定国际组织、公共卫生研究所和非洲国家政府卫生部的网站上搜索相关灰色文献。在去除重复项后，两名审查员将独立筛选所有标题、摘要和全文，以确定每项研究是否与综述相关。我们将使用数据提取工具从纳入的文章中提取数据，并以表格形式呈现结果，同时附有说明文字，以帮助理解。
进行范围综述不需要伦理批准。我们计划通过在同行评议期刊上发表文章、在会议上展示以及与决策者会面来传播本综述的发现。
