Table 2 Characteristics and distribution of the included documents

Study design: Peer-reviewed publications (n = 6), five of which were descriptive, cross-sectional studies, mostly quantitative [40,41,42] rather than qualitative [43], mixed-method [60] or a commentary [48]. The remaining were grey literature (n = 16) and comprised internal reports [39, 57, 51, 51,52,53, 55,56,57,58], a commentary [59], a thesis [46], and news or press releases [54, 47, 49, 50]. Of the grey literature documents, eight reports and the thesis provided methodological descriptions. Most used quantitative cross-sectional designs [58, 55, 56, 46]. Mixed methods were used in four reports, using household surveys, school visits, document or secondary data reviews, focus groups, interviews, and direct observations [39, 53, 52, 44]. One report used qualitative interviews and focus group discussions [45]

Study population: Refugees (n = 6) [44,45,46, 45, 59, 46], IDPs (n = 12) [39,40,41,42,43, 48,49,50,51, 53, 49, 50], specific organization’s beneficiaries [58], or multiple stakeholders including both IDPs/refugees and officials or healthcare providers (n = 3)

Study location: On national level or in multiple governorates (n = 10) [40, 41, 60, 48, 58, 55, 44, 58,59,60] or individual governorates (n = 12) [39, 42, 43, 57, 51, 49,50,51,52,53,54, 50], with no one governorate covered by more than two documents. The studies were mostly in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (n = 12) [40, 41, 44,45,46, 44, 56, 45, 54,55,56, 49], rather than in Iraq (n = 6) [39, 42, 43, 48, 57, 53] or in the Disputed territories of Northern Iraq (n = 4) [60, 58, 47, 50]. Studies were mostly camp-based (n = 10) [40, 41, 60, 52, 55, 44, 46, 54, 47, 50], rather than in community-based (n = 4) [39, 56,57,58], or both settings (n = 6) [42, 43, 51, 45, 59, 49]. In two studies the care setting was not specified [48, 53]

Care provider: Public or private and parallel healthcare providers simultaneously (n = 15) [39,40,41, 43,44,45, 52, 58, 55, 54,55,56,57,58, 50], solely parallel systems (n = 6) [46,47,48, 59, 46, 47], or solely public/private systems (n = 1) [42]

Study period: Published between 2015 and 2020 (n = 17) [39,40,41,42,43,44, 46,47,48,49,50, 56, 46, 56,57,58, 50], between 2010 and 2014 (n = 5) [51, 52, 55, 45, 59] and none prior. Study duration (n = 14) was between 1 and 5 months, except for one 34-month study [43]

Target NCD condition: NCDs in general or more than one NCD (n = 19) [39,40,41,42,43,44,45, 51, 53, 51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60] or DM (n = 3) [48, 46, 50]