Effect of interventions based on educational technologies on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections in incarcerated women: protocol of a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Introduction Prisons are places with high vulnerability and high risk for the development of sexually transmitted infections. World Health Agencies recommend establishing intervention measures, such as information and education, on the prevention of diseases. Thus, technologies as tools for health education have been used to reduce sexually transmitted infections. However, no systematic review has investigated the effectiveness of these interventions. Therefore, this review’s objective is to examine the effect of educational technologies used for preventing sexually transmitted infections in incarcerated women.Methods and analysis Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines will be strictly followed. The following electronic databases will be searched: Scopus; Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health, Education Resources Information Center, Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed/Medline, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Randomised clinical trials of interventions that used educational technologies to prevent sexually transmitted infections in incarcerated women will be searched in the databases from the beginning of 2020 until December by two researchers independently. A narrative synthesis will be constructed for all included studies, and if there are sufficient data, a meta-analysis will be performed using the Review Manager software (V.5.3). Continuous results will be presented as the weighted mean difference or the standardised mean difference with 95% CIs. Under the heterogeneity of the included studies, a random-effects or fixed-effects model will be used. The studies’ heterogeneity will be assessed by the I2 method. The sensitivity analysis will be carried out to examine the magnitude of each study’s influence on the general results. A significance level of p≤0.05 will be adopted.Ethics and disclosure Ethical approval is not required because no primary data will be collected. The results will be published in journals reviewed by peers.PROSPERO registration number CRD42020163820.