Ensuring Educational Quality Across Multiple Sites: Assessment and Standardization in Competency-Based Health Professions Education - A Scoping Review Protocol v1

Introduction: Competency-based healthcare education is increasingly delivered across distributed sites, yet ensuring consistent quality standards and assessment approaches across multiple locations remains a significant challenge. Quality assurance frameworks for distributed competency-based education are poorly characterized, and there is limited understanding of how to balance standardization with local contextual needs while maintaining assessment rigor and inter-site comparability. Purpose: To systematically map quality assurance frameworks, standards, and assessment approaches used to ensure consistent and effective competency-based healthcare education delivery across distributed sites. Methods: Following Arksey and O'Malley's framework (with Levac's refinements) and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review will include studies examining quality assurance systems, accreditation frameworks, and assessment approaches for competency-based healthcare education delivered across distributed sites from 2015-2025. A comprehensive search of PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, CINAHL, Web of Science, ERIC, and gray literature will be conducted. Two independent reviewers will screen titles, abstracts, and full texts. Data extraction will focus on quality assurance frameworks, assessment methods, standardization strategies, accreditation requirements, competency domains, inter-site comparability measures, and technology solutions supporting quality monitoring. Results will be synthesized using descriptive statistics and narrative synthesis.