Parent and carer experiences of health care professionals' communication about childhood obesity: a qualitative systematic review protocol

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the systematic review is to identify, critically appraise, and synthesize the best available qualitative evidence on parent and carer experiences of health care professionals' communication about childhood obesity.

INTRODUCTION: Parents and carers play a key role in a child's environment and healthy development, which is why they can find it confronting to discuss their child's weight. This review will provide an insight into the experiences of parents and carers with health care professionals' communication about their child's overweight or obesity.

INCLUSION CRITERIA: This qualitative review will consider participants who are parents and carers with a child with overweight or obesity (birth to 12 years). The phenomenon of interest are parents' and carers' lived experiences of childhood obesity communication from a health care professional, and the context is health care settings. Communication includes verbal or written communication about a child's obesity from health care professionals and received by a parent or a carer.

METHODS: The proposed review will systematically search the following databases: MEDLINE (EBSCO), CINAHL (EBSCO), PsycINFO (Ovid), Scopus, LILACS, and the Finnish health sciences database MEDIC. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) will be searched for unpublished articles. A manual search will be used to supplement the database searches. The quality of included studies will be assessed independently by 2 reviewers, and the qualitative data will be extracted from papers by 2 independent reviewers using the standardized JBI data extraction tool. The recommended JBI approach to critical appraisal, study selection, data extraction, and data synthesis meta-aggregation will be used.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION NUMBER: PROSPERO CRD42022297709.