Current Understanding of Maternal Healthcare Acceptability from Patients’ Perspectives

A scoping review protocol

Abstract

The importance of healthcare acceptability concept cannot be overlooked in health sciences including psychology, yet, it remains controversial and it is poorly understood by all health researchers. This concept cuts across all health disciplines and it refers to human behaviour such as attitude, trust, and respect through interactions between patients and health professionals. Many studies have been published on acceptability of maternal healthcare, but there is no consensus on how it is defined and conceptualised. Thus, this study aims at reviewing existing literature to shed light on the definition and conceptualisation of maternal healthcare acceptability from the patients’ perspectives. This study will apply scoping review to reach its broad purpose. The search of relevant articles from electronic and grey literature will be guided by a search strategy developed based on eligibility criteria. Two researchers will independently screen the retrieved articles using Rayyan software and chart data from included articles. An agreement of 80% between them will be considered appropriate. This study will provide a general interpretation of key findings in line with available evidence and consistent with the research purpose. The researchers will discuss the study’s limitations and propose potential implications and future research projects.