Informal caregivers’ feeding experiences for children with cancer: a qualitative systematic review protocol

Objective: The objective of this review is to synthesize the experiences of informal caregivers’ feeding practices for children with cancer. Introduction: Changes in eating among children with cancer impact their nutritional status, leading to several negative outcomes. In addition to interventions given by health care providers, informal caregivers’ experiences in feeding these children are worth exploring. Inclusion criteria: This review will include qualitative studies or the qualitative component of mixed method studies examining informal caregivers’ experiences of feeding children with cancer who are under 18 years of age. Children may be in any phase of the cancer journey, and may be at a health care facility or at home. Studies from any country, published in English or Thai in any year up to the present, will be considered for inclusion. Methods: This review will follow the JBI approach for qualitative systematic reviews. A full search strategy for PubMed was developed from an initial limited search of PubMed and CINAHL (EBSCOhost) to identify articles on the topic. The search strategy will be adapted for each database, including Embase (Ovid), PubMed, CINAHL (EBSCOhost), Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), LILACS (BVS), PsycINFO (Ovid), Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and ThaiJO (TCI). The reference lists of studies included in the review will be hand-searched for additional studies. Sources of unpublished studies and gray literature will also be searched. Two reviewers will separately screen for eligible studies, perform the critical appraisal, and extract data. They will then synthesize via meta-aggregation and summarize the data. The final synthesized findings will be graded using the ConQual approach to establish confidence in the qualitative research synthesis. Review registration: PROSPERO CRD42024501382