Evidence on the accreditation of health professionals' education in the WHO Africa region: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: This scoping review aims to map and examine the extent and type of available evidence on health professionals' education accreditation within Africa.

Introduction: The demand for health professionals is unprecedentedly high globally. One response to this challenge has been expanding training through more liberal education policies, facilitating private sector participation in education service provision. Some evidence suggests that this is a double-edged sword, increasing quantity but compromising the quality of health professionals produced. Regulation can provide a framework to assure and continuously improve quality, with such regulation in place in 79% of World Health Organization African countries. However, it is unclear how much and what evidence has been generated on how accreditation happens, where it is concentrated, and the prevailing evidence gaps within this region; therefore, we propose to conduct a scoping review.

Inclusion criteria: This review will include articles and dissertations focusing on the accreditation of health professionals' education in Africa. All methodological approaches and designs will be included. Conference abstracts and protocols will be excluded.

Methods: This review will be carried out according to the JBI scoping review methodology. We conducted an initial search of CINAHL and MEDLINE to identify relevant articles. This informed our selection of keywords, along with index terms, to create a comprehensive search strategy for CINAHL (EBSCOhost), MEDLINE (Ovid), Global Health (Ovid), ERIC (EBSCOhost), Web of Science Core Collection, Embase, and Scopus. Sources included will be limited to those published starting from 2000 onwards. Data will be presented using tables and charts, accompanied by a narrative summary.

Detail of this review project can be found in open science framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/W5G7T.