Navigating reconfiguration: case managers in public municipal healthcare - a scoping review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Public municipal healthcare plays a critical role in delivering equitable, need-based services to the inhabitants. The term is used here for publicly financed services holding territory-based responsibility for the health of a defined resident population at municipal or comparable sub-national level. However, demographic shifts, multimorbidity and resource constraints have reinforced a need for systemic reconfiguration. Within the context of these organisational changes, the scoping review will address the current knowledge gap in understanding the roles, experiences and systemic impact of case managers and other caseworkers as key frontline professionals. The scoping review will consider primary research, publications by relevant and credible national and international websites of health organisations and agencies and public administration and governance bodies. The review aims to map existing literature on how case managers and other caseworkers navigate reconfiguration including organisational change, new models of service delivery, decentralisation and digitalisation.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The JBI (formerly the Joanna Briggs Institute) methodology for scoping reviews and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines will be followed. The systematic search will include Medline (via PubMed), Web of Science, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PsycINFO and Embase databases. Grey literature will be searched using Google Scholar and ProQuest. Searches will be conducted in September–December 2026. Screening of titles, abstracts and full-text articles will be independently conducted by two reviewers. Extracted data will be charted in tables and synthesised thematically. No geographic limits will be applied. Using the Population-Concept-Context framework, inclusion criteria are (1) case managers and other caseworkers, (2) navigating reconfiguration of healthcare and (3) public municipal healthcare and equivalent sub-national arrangements. Exclusion criteria are (1) managers, health personnel, policymakers or clients without direct attention to case managers’ or caseworkers’ work, roles or experiences; (2) studies focusing on individual training programmes or clinical interventions that mention ‘navigation’ or ‘navigate’ only in passing, without substantively analysing reconfiguration of public municipal healthcare; and (3) studies set exclusively in hospitals, at the national policy level, or in settings outside municipal or community healthcare, or in services that are neither publicly financed nor publicly mandated.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The scoping review will not require ethics approval, as all data will be obtained from publicly available literature. The review authors will adhere to principles of honesty and transparency throughout the data extraction and reporting processes and thereby enhance the trustworthiness of the review. Findings will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and disseminated through presentations at relevant conferences.