Understanding surgical disease and care for Maori in Aotearoa: protocol for a scoping review

Introduction Maori continue to experience inequitable healthcare and health outcomes compared with other New Zealanders. A narrative review conducted in 2016 described disparities in access to and through the surgical care pathway for Maori from a limited pool of small retrospective cohort studies. This review only targeted studies that specifically investigated surgical care for Maori; however, many other studies have performed subanalyses for Maori as part of bigger ethnographic epidemiological studies and Indigenous health has become more topical in Australasia since this review was conducted. Health disparities and inequities in surgical care for Maori are still not well understood. This scoping review aims to report the nature and extent of disparities in surgical disease and care for Maori. Methods and analysis A scoping review will be performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews Checklist. This study will be informed by Kaupapa Maori research methodology. Electronic searches of PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature Plus will be performed between 19 February and 19 March 2022. Two authors will independently identify and retrieve relevant texts in an iterative manner and examine how responsive each of the included studies are to Maori using the recently described Maori framework-a framework designed to guide researcher responsiveness to Maori. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval has not been sought as our review will only include published and publicly accessible data. We will publish the review in an open access peer-reviewed surgical journal. This protocol has been registered in Open Science Framework (10.17605/OSF.IO/NP4H3).