Table 2 Areas where further work is needed – Critical appraisal tools

Despite the existence of a variety of checklists and tools there is no agreement on the best approach to assessing the methodological limitations of qualitative studies [27, 31]. Furthermore, in general, the criteria included in existing critical appraisal tools for qualitative studies are considered inadequate when applying CERQual as they are not based on evidence or explicit hypotheses regarding the relationships between components of qualitative study design and conduct and the trustworthiness of the study findings. We plan to undertake further work to locate any existing evidence that can help us identify the most important elements of a critical appraisal tool when used in the context of CERQual. We may then develop a critical appraisal tool for use with CERQual.