Table 1 Summary of the phases in meta-narrative review (adapted from Greenhalgh et al. 2005)

1

Planning phase: assemble multidisciplinary team, establish regular meetings.

→ Established multidisciplinary team.

→ Held regular team meetings.

2

Search phase: initial search led by intuition, search for seminal papers, search for empirical papers.

→ Systematic search of major electronic databases.

→ Searched for seminal papers.

3

Mapping phase: identify key elements of research traditions, main findings.

→ Identified key approaches to the problem of access to HCV antiviral therapy.

→ Identified inconsistencies across approaches.

4

Appraisal phase: evaluation of each paper for relevance to the review question, extract key results, group comparable results;

→ Evaluated each paper for relevance to the research question, extracted key results and categorized comparable areas.

5

Synthesis phase: identify all key dimensions of the problem, give a narrative account of each contribution, treat conflicting findings as higher order data and explain;

→ Described each area with reference to included articles.

→ Critically discussed the areas and inconsistencies across the articles.

6

Recommendations phase: summarise overall messages from the research literature, distil and discuss recommendations for practice, policy and further research.

→ Summarised and distilled key messages from the literature.

→ Made recommendations for developing clinical guidelines and health service policy.