Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Ethical review of health policy is needed to ensure health policies address the needs of society and are ethical. However, institutional health policy analysis has been observed to be informal and lack a clear ethics focus. Tools that assist in reviewing the ethics of health policy can be used to address these problems. There is currently no thorough review of available health policy ethical review tools. This research aims to identify existing review tools designed to analyze the ethics of health policy within primary care and to analyze the tools evaluation process. A systematic search and review of the literature will be conducted to achieve the research goal. Academic databases that will be searched include PubMed, SCOPUS, and EMBASE. Grey literature will be searched using ProQuest, reference lists of relevant articles, and government websites. Literature will be considered if it is in English or French, with no date restriction. Literature will be included if it is empirical or conceptual research, presents or makes use of a sequential tool, assesses health policy or guidelines, and has a strong ethics focus. Articles will be excluded if they do not meet these criteria and if they are tools designed for reviewing research with human subjects. The aim of this review is to search for and critically review the available tools for ethical review of health policy. This research is expected to contribute to the knowledge and improvement of ethics review tools for primary healthcare policy. Overall, this research intends to assist in the development of health policy ethics review.