Methods utilising routinely collected data for evaluating the effectiveness of population-level public health interventions to improve public awareness of cancer symptoms: protocol for a scoping review

Objective The objective of this review is to understand the types of observational study designs and analyses that have been used to investigate the impact of public health interventions that aim to improve early diagnosis of cancer. Introduction Campaigns to improve public awareness of cancer symptoms need to be evaluated at various stages in the cancer pathway. Inclusion criteria Analytic observational studies based on databases of routinely collected health data Methods Abstracts in Ovid Medline and Embase and the Overton policy database from 2010 to the present will be extracted. Full text of potentially relevant sources will be screened. Covidence software will be used to manage the screening and data extraction process. Extracted data will be tabulated and presented graphically. A narrative summary will accompany the tabulated results.