Defining and assessing complex situations in integrated social and health care: A scoping review registration form

Broadly speaking, complex situations can be understood as situations in which a multitude of individual and environmental factors can disrupt, undermine, or even exacerbate the social and/or health circumstances of an individual receiving care. These factors are interwoven within a dynamic and unstable system that spans the individual (micro), organizational (meso), and societal (macro) levels. With the aim of designing appropriate integrated interventions to meet individual social and health needs, professionals from social services and health care organizations require shared definitions and tools to intervene in an interprofessional and coordinated manner. Yet in practice, the operational definitions and assessment tools used in social and health care practice remain highly siloed within each discipline. To address this gap, this scoping review aims to map operational definitions of complex situations in integrated social and health care. Specifically, the review intends to catalogue existing definitions of complexity in social and health care and to identify tools that enable professionals from both fields to assess complexity jointly and in an integrated manner.