Table 4.

PICO(s) criteria guiding the preliminary search in Phase 1a

Participants/population	Healthcare professionals caring for or involved in the provision of supported self-management approaches and interventions for, people (adults aged >18 years) with a diagnosis of stroke. Papers pertaining to people who do not have a diagnosis of stroke (eg, Transient Ischaemic Attack (TIA)), childhood stroke or which focus on informal caregivers only will be excluded.
Intervention(s)	Supported self-management refers to a collaborative approach which involves working in partnership with stroke survivors and their families in an ongoing and sustained manner and includes interventions and approaches that help people to develop the skills, knowledge, confidence and resilience to manage the impact of their stroke. This includes aspects of medical, role and emotional management, behaviour change and the management of multiple morbidities. We are interested in papers that conceptualise supported self-management as an approach which embraces a paradigm shift in the way that practitioners, and stroke survivors and their families work together to jointly identify and address individuals’ long-term needs, priorities and goals. We will exclude papers/documents that do not align with this conceptualisation of supported self-management (ie, are about compliance with professionally driven treatment plans or supervision and instruction of rehabilitation exercises) or focus on general recovery, secondary prevention activities and rehabilitation in stroke (but with no reference to self-management approaches).
Context	Papers identified in the systematic search will relate to the provision or experiences of supported self-management in stroke in healthcare settings. Although community settings will be of specific interest, papers relating to other settings which can help to refine or refute the developing programme theories will be included.
Outcome(s)	The main outcome of this review is to identify programme theories that explain what works, for whom and under what circumstances and why in relation to the implementation of supported self-management in stroke care.
Types of study to be included	In keeping with the RAMESES guidelines for realist reviews,47 all studies designs will be included. Documents such as editorials, opinion pieces, qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies as well as systematic reviews may be included if they are relevant to the developing programme theories. Study protocols, conference abstracts and theses will be checked on Google Scholar for related full-text papers and where available, these will be retrieved and the original ‘title’ excluded. Where no alternative version exists, we will include the original ‘title’ if they provide evidence to support or refute the developing programme theories.