Community-Academic Partnerships and Healthcare Workforce Development in Underserved Areas: A Scoping Review Protocol v1

Introduction Distributed healthcare education often involves collaborations between academic institutions and community sites to alleviate workforce shortages in underserved regions. These partnerships seek to establish recruitment and training pathways where learners are trained in underserved communities and then practice there. Nonetheless, the models of such partnerships differ greatly in their structure, quality, and success. Gap Statement Despite the common use of community-academic partnerships in workforce development, there is still fragmented evidence on effective partnership models, how partnership features relate to workforce results, and methods for maintaining these collaborations. Program leaders often lack guidance grounded in evidence to help them design partnerships that effectively recruit, train, and retain healthcare professionals in underserved areas. Purpose To systematically identify community-academic partnership models in distributed healthcare education and analyze how they relate to healthcare workforce development outcomes in underserved regions. Methods Summary Following Arksey and O'Malley's framework, enhanced by Levac, and adhering to PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this review will analyze community-academic partnerships in distributed healthcare education from 2015 to 2025. The search will include databases such as PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, CINAHL, Web of Science, ERIC, and relevant grey literature. Two independent reviewers will screen studies using clear operational definitions. Data extraction will be conducted using Bringle & Hatcher's Partnership Quality Framework to describe partnerships. At the same time, workforce outcomes will be categorized according to the WHO's Health Workforce Pipeline stages, including recruitment, training, transition, and retention. The findings will synthesize partnership models, highlight strategies at each stage of the pipeline, and explore the links between partnership features and workforce outcomes.