Abstract
Background and aims: Globally in the health sector, governments use public-private partnerships (PPPs) to make significant contributions to the development and implementation of national health policies and strategies to improve health systems and health outcomes. Following the World Health Organization's resolution on universal health coverage (UHC), healthcare PPPs have emerged as an innovative policy option, especially, for countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to progress towards achieving UHC. Although many studies have reported the use of healthcare PPPs, it appears no review has been conducted to synthesize evidence on how it facilitates or hinders progress toward attaining UHC in the SSA context. This review seeks to fill this research gap by systematically synthesizing the literature on healthcare PPPs used in SSA and examining how various forms of healthcare PPPs affect progress towards attaining UHC in SSA.
Methods: Arksey and O'Malley's guidelines for conducting scoping reviews will guide the review process. PubMed, Medline (Ovid), Global Health (Ovid), Web of Science, Scopus, and EconLit will be searched for studies published from January 2013 to December 2023. Thematic analysis of data will be employed for this review.
Discussion: Since the WHO endorsed the use of PPPs as a means of achieving UHC, PPPs in the health sector have increasingly become popular for many healthcare projects and services especially in SSA. Yet, limited evidence around how PPP models have taken shape and their impact on achieving UHC creates a significant gap in understanding how PPPs affect progress toward UHC.
Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this scoping review is the first to identify and examine healthcare PPPs in SSA for UHC. The approaches outlined in this protocol make several important advances in methods for examining PPPs, particularly for UHC in SSA, and can be applied elsewhere.
Protocol registration: This protocol has been registered on Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/V9874.