Scoping Review Will Map Māori Eye Health Interventions and the Role of Kaupapa Māori Methods
Māori continue to face higher rates of disease and poorer outcomes than non-Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, and eye health sits squarely inside that inequity. The planned scoping review in BMJ Open sets out to identify every published and publicly accessible intervention aimed at improving Māori eye health, then examine how often those studies have been shaped by Kaupapa Māori approaches. In practical terms, the project asks a blunt question with bedside consequences: which eye-health interventions have been designed in ways that genuinely reflect Māori priorities, knowledge, and service realities?
The focus matters because eye disease does not unfold in isolation from the health system that surrounds it. For communities already facing barriers to access, trust, continuity, and culturally safe care, the design of research can influence whether an intervention is adopted, sustained, or ignored. Kaupapa Māori approaches — described here as by Māori, with Māori, for Māori — are not cosmetic additions to a project title. They shape governance, framing, interpretation, and the likelihood that findings translate into services that Māori communities can recognize as their own.
One sentence captures the gap the review is built around: Māori eye health has been under-researched.
Search Strategy Covers Published and Grey Literature Without Time or Language Limits
The protocol uses scoping review methods and will be reported in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Searches were run across MEDLINE, Embase, and Google Scholar with keywords centered on Māori eye health, Kaupapa Māori, and eye-health interventions. No language restrictions and no time restrictions were applied, widening the net beyond the usual English-language biomedical canon and reducing the risk that smaller or locally circulated reports are missed.
That choice is especially relevant for Indigenous health research, where valuable work often lives outside conventional trial journals. By including both peer-reviewed studies and grey literature, the review is built to capture service reports, community-facing evaluations, and other publicly available material that may be invisible in standard database searches. An information specialist conducted the search, which strengthens reproducibility and should improve the likelihood that the final map reflects the real breadth of available evidence rather than just the most easily indexed papers.
Two reviewers will independently screen abstracts and full texts, then chart the eligible material in Covidence. The protocol also specifies what will be extracted: publication features, study characteristics, intervention details, and whether a Kaupapa Māori approach was used. When such an approach is present, the team will chart its characteristics in more detail, allowing the review to move beyond a binary yes-or-no label and toward a more nuanced account of how Indigenous methods are operationalized in eye-health research.
Responsiveness to Māori Will Be Judged With MĀORI and CONSIDER Frameworks
The review will not stop at counting interventions. It will also assess how responsive each included study is to Māori using the MĀORI framework and the CONSIDER statement. Those tools are designed to evaluate the degree to which research is aligned with Indigenous priorities, values, and participation, rather than simply measuring whether Māori were present in a sample.
In eye care, where screening, referral pathways, and treatment adherence depend heavily on patient experience and system trust, this distinction carries direct clinical weight. A technically sound intervention can still fail if it is not designed around the social and cultural conditions that determine whether patients can reach services and remain engaged with care. For Māori, a framework that measures responsiveness may reveal whether interventions have been constructed to address structural barriers, or whether they merely observe them from a distance.
The team plans to summarize findings in tables, graphs, maps, and narrative text. That format suits a field where the evidence base may be sparse, uneven, and methodologically heterogeneous. A scoping review is not intended to rank interventions by effect size or settle causal questions about which model works best. Its value lies in establishing what exists, where the gaps are, and how frequently Māori-centered research methods are being used at all.
A Protocol Aimed at Service Planning, Education, and Wider Indigenous Optometry Work
The authors state that, to the best of their knowledge, this is the first review to examine published and publicly accessible literature on interventions for improving Māori eye health alongside the use of Kaupapa Māori approaches. No ethical approval is required because only public-domain information will be included. The planned dissemination reaches beyond academic publication: findings will be shared in an open-access journal, presented at conferences, and communicated to Māori community and service organisations, scholars, and staff working in Māori eye health.
That dissemination plan signals the intended audience. Hauora Māori providers, eye-care organisations, education and training providers, and research teams all stand to benefit from a clearer picture of what has been tried, what has been documented, and where Indigenous methodologies have been absent. The review also feeds into a broader project examining Indigenous perspectives in optometry, linking this protocol to a larger effort to support equitable outcomes in eye care.
The registration details add another layer of transparency. The protocol was registered with the Open Science Framework on 27 February 2025. For a scoping review centered on an under-researched population, that matters because it makes the planned methods visible before the evidence is assembled, reducing the temptation to reshape the review around whatever the literature happens to contain.
The Real Test Will Be Whether the Evidence Base Reflects Māori Priorities
A protocol cannot yet answer whether Māori eye-health interventions improve vision, access, or service uptake. What it can do is define the boundaries of the evidence and expose where the field has relied on non-Indigenous research structures to study an Indigenous health problem. If the final review finds few interventions grounded in Kaupapa Māori methods, that absence will be informative in itself. It would point to a research infrastructure that has not consistently centered Māori knowledge in a domain where inequity is already well established.
The review may also reveal whether the existing literature treats Māori as a population to be measured or as partners in design and interpretation. In eye health, where preventable vision loss can accumulate quietly over time, research approaches that fail to account for access, trust, and cultural safety risk producing conclusions that are scientifically tidy but clinically thin. The protocol is built to test that gap with structured methods, explicit frameworks, and a broad search strategy. The eventual findings will show whether Māori eye health research has moved far enough from description toward service models that are truly shaped by Māori communities themselves.