Evidence Synthesis

The results are expected to support health professionals, managers, and policy makers in improving primary healthcare actions and developing protocols, care pathways, and future research. No meta-analysis is expected because included studies are likely to vary widely in design, population, context, intersectional axes, and outcomes. Hedges’ g will be used for standardised mean differences when similar outcomes are measured on different scales. Including Cochrane RoB V.2.0 assessment is identified as a novel contribution rarely implemented in scoping reviews. The correlation summary will describe associations between HRV indices and functional recovery outcomes such as ObsQoR-11, pain scores, and time to ambulation. Sensitivity analysis will test the robustness of results including the effect of excluding studies of poor methodological quality such as non-peer-reviewed publications. Risk of bias will be assessed independently using the Cochrane RoB 2 tool. Study quality will be evaluated using QUADAS-2 across four diagnostic accuracy domains. The certainty of the evidence will be graded with the GRADE diagnostic instrument. GRADE will be used to assess certainty of evidence for key…