Trauma-Informed Care in Digital Health Technologies: A Scoping Review Protocol (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digital health is becoming increasingly common across the globe. At the same time, there is an increasing recognition of how digital health can inadvertently foment psychological trauma. This phenomenon has led to the adoption of trauma-informed care in designing and deploying digital health. However, how trauma-informed care is discussed, and the various trauma-informed care strategies employed in designing and/or deploying digital health technologies remain unexplored and ill-understood. OBJECTIVE The Objective of this scoping review is to explore and synthesize the literature on how trauma-informed care is defined in digital health and the various trauma-informed care principles employed in designing and deploying digital health METHODS This review will draw on the JBI updated methodological guidance for scoping reviews. A search will be conducted on CINAHL, MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase, Engineering Village, Web of Science, Scopus, and Psych INFO. This review will consider published research studies and unpublished work (grey literature). Studies will be included if they applied trauma-informed care in designing or deploying digital health for patients across all geographical locations. Or if they provide trauma-informed recommendations on how developers should develop digital health. Studies will be limited to only English language publications within the last 10 years. Two independent reviewers will screen the titles, abstracts, and then a full-text review. Data will be extracted into a data extraction tool developed for this study RESULTS The scoping review was undergoing a full search as of February 2023. The main results will synthesize the peer-reviewed and grey literature on adopting trauma-informed care practices in digital health research and development. The study is expected to be completed by 2023 and the results published in a peer-reviewed journal CONCLUSIONS The findings of this scoping review would be very useful for people with various traumatic disorders who adopt digital health interventions as complementary and/or alternative channels for accessing healthcare