Mapping the evidence of effective coverage of emergency obstetric and neonatal care services and factors affecting utilization of quality service in Africa: a scoping review protocol

Improving effective coverage of obstetric services is one of the priority health agendas. This scoping review aims to map the evidence of effective coverage of emergency obstetric and neonatal care services and factors affecting the utilization of quality service in Africa. The studies will be selected, appraised, and reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for Scoping Reviews methods. Searches will be done to the major medical electronic databases such as EBSCOhost, PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and SCOPUS to find published studies. Besides, the WHO, demographic and health surveys (DHS), and other international organizations' websites will be searched to find relevant gray literature. The review will include all relevant published studies and gray literature from January 2011 to December 2020 in Africa. The results of the review will be analyzed thematically using Nvivo version–12 software.