Linking Healthcare Quality and Knowledge Management in Traditional and Ethnomedicine-Oriented Hospitals: A Scoping Review and Implementation Framework.

Traditional and ethnomedicine-oriented hospitals operate at the intersection of culturally embedded clinical knowledge, contemporary biomedical evidence, regulatory requirements, and patient expectations. Their quality challenges therefore extend beyond conventional compliance and include the preservation, validation, translation, and safe application of knowledge. This scoping review mapped how healthcare quality management and knowledge management have been conceptualized and operationalized in hospital and health service settings relevant to traditional, complementary, integrative, Indigenous, and ethnomedicine-based care, and developed an implementation framework for Uyghur medicine services. The review followed Joanna Briggs Institute guidance, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), and PRISMA Extension for Reporting Literature Searches in Systematic Reviews (PRISMA-S). The information source plan covered PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, ProQuest, and Google Scholar, supplemented by the World Health Organization, International Organization for Standardization, Chinese policy and standards sources, publisher records, and citation chaining through July 27, 2026. Records were captured through directly accessible interfaces, database-targeted discovery, verified publisher metadata, and citation indexing. Ninety-six candidate records were captured; 73 unique records were screened, 60 full-text articles or complete source records were assessed, and 53 sources were included. Evidence clustered into seven interdependent domains: governance and accountability; evidence generation and context-sensitive standardization; preservation and transfer of tacit knowledge; patient safety and clinical risk; culturally and linguistically responsive person-centered care; digital knowledge infrastructure and organizational learning; and integration, referral coordination, and outcome measurement. Forty-one included sources were peer-reviewed publications, and 12 were authoritative policy or standards documents. Six sources directly addressed Uyghur medicine or immediately applicable ethnic-medicine policy and guidance, but none evaluated a hospital-wide quality management and knowledge management system in a Uyghur medicine hospital. We propose a Quality-Knowledge Integration Cycle linking traditional knowledge, external evidence, routine data, and patient experience to validation, codification, sharing, clinical application, and feedback against recognized quality dimensions. The framework offers a practical governance and research agenda for ethnomedicine-oriented hospitals while preserving epistemic distinctiveness and strengthening safety, equity, and learning.