Autistic and/or ADHD adults’ lived experiences of accessing physical healthcare services: a scoping review protocol

Protocol for scoping review.BackgroundThere is a now a significant body of work that suggests that autistic and/or ADHD patients experience poorer health and health outcomes than their neurotypical (NT) counterparts (Bishop-Fitzpatrick & Kind, 2017; Nigg, 2013; Weir et al., 2022; Yerys et al., 2025) and frequently report multiple barriers to accessing health services (Doherty et al., 2022; Weir et al., 2022).This scoping review will examine autistic and/or ADHD (hereafter ASC/ADHD) adults’ lived experiences of accessing, or attempting to access, physical healthcare services. A scoping review (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Peters et al., 2024) was considered the most appropriate form of evidence synthesis to identify knowledge gaps and chart the existing research due to the paucity of existing research (Munn et al., 2018, 2022).The small amount of existing research into ASC/ADHD experiences of healthcare services has frequently focused on diagnostic and support services or mental healthcare (e.g. French et al., 2020; Singh & Bunyak, 2019; Solberg et al., 2019) rather than physical healthcare services. There is also very little research that considers experiences at the intersections of ASC and/or ADHD. The majority of previous reviews have only considered autistic experiences of healthcare and have required a clinical diagnosis of ASC (Calleja et al., 2020), combined the experiences of children, adolescents and adults (Greenwood et al., 2024; Mason et al., 2019) or focused on the perspectives of HCPs (Morris et al., 2019, 2023).ObjectiveThe principal objective of this scoping review is to establish the extent of current literature exploring autistic and/or ADHD adults’ lived experiences of accessing, or attempting to access, physical healthcare services and to identify priorities for future research.