Introduction Effectively identifying deteriorated patients is vital to the development and validation of automated systems designed to predict clinical deterioration. Existing outcome measures used for this purpose have significant limitations. Published criteria for admission to high acuity inpatient areas may represent markers of patient deterioration and could inform the development of alternate outcome measures.

Objectives This is a protocol for a scoping review which aims to characterise published criteria for admission of adult inpatients to high acuity inpatient areas including intensive care units.

Data sources Electronic databases PubMed and ProQuest EBook Central will be searched to identify papers published from 1999 to date of search. Publications of interest are those which describe prescriptive criteria for admission of adult inpatients to a clinical area with a higher level of care than a general hospital ward.

Charting methods Data will be extracted from each publication using a standardised data-charting form.

Data synthesis Admission criteria characteristics from included publications will be summarised and presented in text and summary table form.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This study did not receive any funding.

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