The influencing factors of compliance with health protocols related to Covid-19: a scoping review

The outbreak of Covid-19 is a global health emergency. Compliance with health protocols is the main key to preventing the transmission of this disease. The purpose of the present study was to review the related research to investigate the factors affecting compliance with health protocols related to Covid-19.

This scoping review examined studies published in Persian and English language biomedical journals with related keywords including health protocols, masking, quarantine, distancing, hand washing, and risk perception in search engines such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, and SID.

In all 22 relevant articles were entered into the review. The results led to the identification of more than 30 effective factors in compliance with health protocols. Factors such as gender, understanding the risk of disease, government measures, the role of friends and family, the media, and people's information sources played the biggest role in people's compliance with the protocols, respectively. Also, protective measures such as staying at home when feeling unwell, covering coughs and sneezes, and not using public transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic had reported having the highest compliance rate and the lowest was behaviors such as washing hands after sneezing and coughing as well as disinfecting the mobile phone.

To increase compliance with protocols, it is necessary to consider individual and environmental factors affecting compliance with protocols, which can be categorized as facilitators, barriers, and encouragers of target health behaviors as these factors are context and time-dependent. Timely identification of accurate factors in any country is a key step in formulating and designing interventions to manage pandemics such as Covid- 19