Identifying how health professional educators address cognitive and implicit bias in clinical decision making: A scoping review protocol
Creators: name: Thompson, John
name: Bujalka, Helena
name: McKeever, Stephen
name: Lipscomb, Adrienne
name: Moore, Sonya
name: Hill, Nicole
name: Kinney, Sharon
name: Gerdtz, Marie
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Education
subject: Clinical decision making
subject: Cognitive Bias
subject: Education
subject: Implicit Bias
subject: Teaching

description: Objective: To describe the teaching strategies employed in health education settings to reduce the influence of cognitive and implicit bias in health professional students’ clinical decision-making. Introduction: Cognitive and implicit biases negatively impact clinicians’ decision-making capacity and can have devastating consequences for the provision of safe, effective, equitable healthcare. There is some evidence that clinicians can be taught strategies to recognise or mitigate cognitive biases, so it is important that educators proactively prepare pre-registration healthcare students to be workforce ready by incorporating self-awareness about cognitive and implicit biases and strategies to mitigate these into curricula. Notwithstanding commentary on the nature and potential impacts of cognitive and implicit bias, the specific pedagogical techniques used to enhance clinical decision making of learners are relatively unknown. Inclusion criteria: All articles exploring pedagogical approaches and/or educational techniques, strategies, teaching tools to reduce cognitive and implicit biases/errors (concept), delivered in tertiary healthcare education settings (context) to preregistration students in any healthcare discipline (population) will be included. Methods: The proposed scoping review will be guided by the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews. Peer review of qualitative and quantitative research employing any research design, in English, will be performed. Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), the Cochrane Library, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PsycINFO, Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI), Embase and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) will be searched. Grey literature will be identified by searching OpenDissertations and Google Scholar. Conference abstracts, editorials and opinion papers will be excluded. Two reviewers will independently screen all abstracts and full-text studies for inclusion. Data extraction will be performed using two reviewers. Results: Results will be reported via the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) flow diagram, accompanied by a narrative summary to explain how the results relate to the review questions and objectives. Implications: Key findings from this review will be used to develop research questions that will inform curriculum development and teaching strategies aimed at mitigating cognitive and implicit biases. The results will be disseminated though peer-reviewed publication and conference presentations