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Background Indwelling urinary catheters go along with high risk of urinary tract infections. Clinical guidelines therefore recommend restrictive catheter use in hospitals. However, interventions to reduce indwelling urinary catheters in hospitals are challenging. Several systematic reviews identified promising approaches mostly as part of intervention bundles. It remains unclear how intervention components should actually be implemented. Therefore, we performed a comprehensive synthesis of existing evidence and aimed to identify and describe appropriate intervention components to reduce the use of indwelling urinary catheters in acute care hospitals, and to identify and describe implementation strategies associated with these intervention components. Methods We performed a scoping review with the following concepts of interest: interventions to reduce indwelling urinary catheters in hospitals, their theoretical foundation and drivers enabling implementation. The systematic search was conducted in five consecutive steps from July 2015 to February 2016 and covered the Cochrane Library, Med-line, Cinahl, and guideline databases. Primary research articles (published since 2008), systematic reviews, and clinical guidelines (updated at the latest in 2010) in German or English language were included (n = 70 publications). To systemize implementation strategies for intervention components we used implementation drivers related to organization and staff competency according to the Active Implementation Framework. Results Identified core intervention components were defined indications for indwelling urinary catheters, reminder systems, and stop orders. On the organizational level they are flanked by institutionalized guidelines addressing responsibilities and processes, integrating the program's components in electronic medical records, and performance assessment and feedback. On the staff competency level the interventions are accompanied by various training modalities as well as deployment of staff with special responsibilities and authorization. Consideration of multiprofessional stakeholders' view and circumstances by assessment of knowledge, barriers and needs was used to model an intervention and to support the implementation process. The intervention components can be justified in a satisfactory manner by a range of guideline recommendations and systematically assessed evidence of mainly observational trials. Conclusions The identified intervention components and implementation strategies are suitable to model a complex intervention to reduce catheters in hospitals. Many of the components involve multiprofessional aspects. In particular, collaboration of physicians and nurses seems to be mandatory. Limitations exist in the underlying evidence for some components due to used study designs in primary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]