National Care Service - national systems of social care in Nordic and Scandinavian countries: learning and evidence review

2. Methods

Due to limited time, a rapid scoping review was undertaken by Public Health Scotland to identify key learning from the three research questions above. The review focused on research studies looking at integrated care where the emphasis was on social care rather than primary care. Countries included in the review were the Nordic and Scandinavian countries as they have similarities to our demographics and type of delivery provision in terms of health and social care. Pan-European studies were included if any of the Nordic and Scandinavian countries were involved.

A steering group was established with representatives from Public Health Scotland, Scottish Government, Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the University of Edinburgh (see Appendix 1 for list of members).

Our search strategy was developed in collaboration with Public Health Scotland's Knowledge Services team. Keywords included (but were not limited to) integrated care; social care, long-term care, person-centred and user experience and linked to various aspects of integrated social care (see Appendix 2 for search strategy). The search was limited to English language from 2010 onwards. Both peer-reviewed and grey literature were included. There were 1,202 references retrieved from six peer-reviewed literature databases (Medline, Embase, Proquest, Scopus, CINAHL and SCIE). An additional 800 references were retrieved from the grey literature using Google. A preliminary first screen of the grey literature was undertaken to remove reports such as blogs and websites resulting in 305 references.

All references were screened in Covidence, a commercial reference manager software tool. Criteria for inclusion/exclusion were based around the PICOS framework - Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes and Study design (see Appendix 2 for inclusion/exclusion criteria). Both title/abstract screening and full text screening were carried out by two independent reviewers. Additional references were obtained from the steering group as well as from limited hand searching of key documents. Due to the limited time, no formal quality assurance process was carried out on the included reports.