Introduction A clinical academic is a health professional engaged in clinical, research and academic activities, providing leadership to improve evidence-based healthcare and bridge the gap between research and clinical practice supporting evidence-based care. Clinical academics bring patient-focused insights to research, benefiting organisations and service users. A formal clinical academic career framework builds research capacity within the professions, embedding research into education and practice. Methods and analysis This systematic review will provide an in-depth exploration of the approaches taken internationally to the development, implementation, maintenance and impact of clinical academic career frameworks. The systematic review with narrative synthesis will be reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses 2020 checklist. Searches for healthcare professionals, clinical academic as conjoined role, and organisational enablers and facilitators will be conducted by a librarian in CINAHL (EBSCO), MEDLINE (EBSCO), PsycINFO (EBSCO) and Embase (Ovid) with no timeline or language restrictions. A targeted grey literature search of select websites and databases will be performed. Screening will be performed by two persons independently, supported by the Covidence platform. Papers which describe the components of, or have evaluated, a clinical academic career framework will be included. A narrative synthesis will be presented to summarise the range of overarching structures, processes and approaches employed internationally to the development and implementation of clinical academic career frameworks for healthcare professionals. The results of the review will aid policymakers who are considering the implementation of policies which support the training, initiation and maintenance of healthcare professionals in roles that span clinical, research and academic contexts. Ethics and dissemination This review uses publicly available data within published papers; therefore, ethical approval is not required. Regular and ongoing contact with members of the Implementation Project Group will support the publication and wider dissemination of this systematic review.
Hegarty et al. (Sun,) studied this question.