Methods for economic assessment of health impacts of public health emergencies: a scoping review protocol
Description
The study seeks to summarize available evidence on methods of economic assessment of the impacts of public health emergencies. It will follow the rapid review study design and will be conducted in accordance with the direction of the published Cochrane Collaboration and the fundamentals of the World Health Organization's rapid rapid guide to public policy. Additionally, it is noteworthy that this review is not intended to evaluate a specific intervention. Thus, the study also adheres to the concept of scope review methodology. Studies that estimate the impacts of any public health emergency will be considered, that estimate components of direct medical and non-medical costs, as well as indirect costs (early death and lost productivity) from the perspective of society, governments and health systems around the world and in any period. Bibliographic searches will be carried out in the sources Online System for Analysis and Recovery of Medical Literature, Tripdatabase and the Virtual Health Library. Furthermore, free searches will be conducted on the websites of associations such as ECDC European Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the United Nations Office for the Disaster Risk Reduction. The searches will be negotiated in September 2021 and updated until the delivery date of the final revision version. The search will be built from the MeSH controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary (keywords and synonyms) in PubMed and adapted to the other databases and will be structured around the main components 1) outbreaks and epidemics 2) Disasters 3) Emergency in Public Health 4) Costs 5) Economic Studies and 6) Systematic Reviews. The selection process will be carried out in two stages. In the first, In screening with title and abstract reading, two reviewers conduct a pilot exercise with the same 30 studies to calibrate eligibility criteria. Then 20% of titles and resumes will be read by the two reviewers independently. Exclusive abstracts will be split between the two reviewers and each reviewer will evaluate all abstracts excluded by their peer. The second stage, reading the full text, will follow the calibration parameters of titles and résumés with the reading of the same initial set of five studies by the two researchers. Then, the texts will be divided between the two reviewers. Included studies will be split between the two reviewers for data extraction using a pre-studied and pilot tested electronic extraction spreadsheet with five studies. A second reviewer will validate all data extracted by your peer. A descriptive summary of the results will be performed. As scope reviews are not intended to produce a synthesis for a particular question, the assessment of methodological limitations or risk of bias of the identified evidence not carried out.