Improving primary care referral to specialist services: a protocol for a 10-year global systematic review in the Australian context

INTRODUCTION: Barriers to accessing specialist services impart a significant burden on patient outcomes and experience as well as a cost and administrative burden on health systems due to healthcare wastage and inefficiencies. This paper outlines the planned protocol for a systematic review relating to how health systems perform with regard to patient access to specialist care, and the efficacy of interventions aimed at improving this. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Systematic review of the literature will be carried out on publications retrieved by searching the following electronic literature databases: EBSCOhost Megafile Ultimate (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Academic Search Ultimate, APA Psychological Abstracts (PsycINFO), HealthSource), PubMed (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE)), Elsevier Bibliographic Database (Scopus), Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), Web of Science and The Cochrane Library. Articles published over a 10-year period (2012–2022) will be analysed to determine; current accessibility and availability problems faced by primary care services when referring patients to specialist care, and the effectiveness of interventions to improve primary care access to specialist services. Grey literature publications (ie, government reports, policy statements and issues papers, conference proceedings) will not be analysed in this review. Articles not published in English, Spanish or Portuguese will not be included. Two independent reviewers will conduct the initial screening, disagreements will be resolved by a third independent reviewer, following which data extraction and selection of eligible sources will be carried out. Selected articles will be categorised on study design, setting and participants. Methodological quality and heterogeneity will subsequently be assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. A descriptive approach will be used to review and synthesise the findings. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study does not require ethics committee review as it solely focuses on analysing published literature. Findings will be published and disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42022354890.