Clinical preventive guidelines for school-aged children and adolescents in primary care: a protocol for a systematic review

INTRODUCTION: Guidelines for clinical preventive services targeting school-aged children and adolescents in primary care are limited, often inconsistent and difficult to apply in clinical contexts. This publication describes the protocol concerning a comprehensive systematic review that primarily aims to collect and synthesise available guidelines for prevention in primary care focused on school-aged children living in high-income regions. A second objective is to assess the quality of identified documents. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will search for reports providing clinical practice guidelines or consensus or expert opinion on preventive actions in paediatric primary care. We will use the WHO definition of prevention. We will focus on children aged 6–18 years living in the European region, the USA, Canada and Australia. We will search PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and Cochrane Library and guidelines-specific databases from 1 January 2010. We will also explore the grey literature using web search engines (Google and Google Scholar). We will finally obtain unpublished information through personal contact with national paediatric societies. We will summarise all identified documents as well as their potential methodological bias. We will further use the Appraisal of Guidelines Research and Evaluation Instrument, version II tool to critically appraise their quality. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Our findings will contribute to the identification of clinical preventive guidelines for which implementation in routine paediatric primary care should be considered. We intend to disseminate our results through publication in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. PROSPERO registration number CRD42020163184.