Fundamental nursing care focusing on older people's needs and continuity of long-term care: a scoping review protocol.

Introduction: Knowledge about long-term care services ability, regardless of if the service is home-based or facility-based, to provide an optimal and comprehensive fundamental nursing care (understood as focusing on physical, relational and psychosocial needs) consistently over time is sparse. Research into nursing indicates the presence of a discontinuous and fragmented healthcare service, and that fundamental nursing care such as mobilisation, nutrition and hygiene among older people (65 years and above) seems to be, regardless of reasons, systematically rationed by nursing staff. Thus, our scoping review aims to explore the published scientific literature on fundamental nursing care and continuity of care targeting older people's needs while also describing identified nursing interventions with the same foci in a long-term care context.

Methods And Analysis: The upcoming scoping review will be conducted in accordance with Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework for scoping studies. Search strategies will be developed and adjusted to each database, for example, PubMed, CINAHL and PsychINFO. Searches will be limited to the years 2002-2023. Studies focusing our aim, regardless of study design, will be eligible for inclusion. Included studies will be quality assessed and data will be charted using an extraction form. Textual data will be presented through a thematic analysis and numerical data by a descriptive numerical analysis. This protocol adheres to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol checklist.

Ethics And Dissemination: The upcoming scoping review will take into consideration ethical reporting in primary research as part of the quality assessment. The findings will be submitted to an open-access peer-reviewed journal. Under the Norwegian Act on Medical and Health-related Research, this study does not need ethical clearance by a regional ethical review authority as it will not generate any primary data or obtain sensitive data or biological samples.