Abstract

Background
The healthcare workforce is facing numerous challenges, with retaining skilled, qualified, and experienced practitioners being paramount. Exit interviews are a long-established practice with evidence of effectiveness across a range of settings, but are rarely implemented among health professionals. Research on the use of exit interviews mirrors this pattern. This scoping review will address this gap by systematically mapping the use of exit interviews in the literature on health professionals and trainees.

Objective
This protocol describes the scoping review process, with a primary question: What is known about the use of exit interviews in health professions education?

Methods and Analysis
This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology and will report using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for
Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist. The review will involve systematic searches of academic and grey literature databases. The review will include any studies that utilise or describe exit interviews in the context of health professions education, broadly defined. No data limit will be applied. Titles, abstracts, and full texts will be screened in a two-stage process. At each stage, an initial pilot stage of 10% of identified sources will be reviewed by two independent screeners. A Kappa score indicating substantial agreement (0.61-0.80) will be required before the remaining screening can be completed by a single reviewer. This will be supported by the Rayyan systematic review management platform. Data extraction will be performed by one reviewer and checked by a second, with disagreements resolved by consensus. A further AI-powered verification of data extraction will be performed. The findings will map existing approaches, highlight research gaps and inform future research using exit interviews.

Ethics and Dissemination
This scoping review will use publicly available data; therefore, no ethical approval is required. The findings from the completed review will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and for presentation at relevant conferences.

Registration
This protocol is registered on the Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PT2RX