Diabetes is a leading non-communicable disease with a huge and predictably increasing burden on individuals, societies and governments. Interprofessional education (IPE) aims to enhance healthcare providers’ competence and patient care by providing well-organised, coordinated interprofessional care (IPC) within teams of healthcare professionals of different disciplines. Interprofessional practices are crucial in diabetes care. However, evidence on the effect of diabetes-specific IPE on diabetes outcomes is limited.
For chronic diseases to be managed more effectively, operative collaborative relationships must be established between healthcare practitioners from different disciplines, which can be achieved through teamwork. This is equally true for the management of diabetes as a disease of complex nature and multisystem involvement, of which prevalence continues to rise [1]. Due to this increasing prevalence, people with diabetes are more often being treated, whether in the inpatient or outpatient settings, by HCPs who are not always adequately trained to provide optimal diabetes care, which causes delays in care provision and suboptimal patient outcomes [21]. Additionally, quality-improvement collaboratives that are well integrated and patient centred are cost effective for large groups of people with diabetes [45]. This calls for developing an effective and efficient collaborative workforce equipped with the skills and knowledge to confidently manage diabetes in a timely manner [21]. At the core of providing effective, efficient healthcare services is IPE as a didactic program adopted to teach HCPs from different disciplines and its practical application, interprofessional collaboration, which describes how service to patients is provided within the multidisciplinary team of HCPs [14,18]. Two main features of IPE and IPC are the subject of recent research. Firstly, the effect of IPE and IPC has been evaluated on different aspects of the providers’ treatments of people with diabetes and other chronic diseases, while the other research parameter is the impact of IPC interventions on patient outcomes. While most studies ascertain an overall positive effect on HCPs’ practice [9,18,23], the extent to which IPE and IPC improve chronic disease outcomes in patients is a question with an answer that is not yet as conclusive but has been studied in many systematic reviews and meta-analyses [7,21].
Diabetes self-management (DSM) is a vital aspect of non-pharmacologic diabetes care that, when adequately applied, dramatically impacts the development and progression of diabetes by achieving good glycaemic control, reducing diabetes complications and improving the quality of life in a cost-effective manner [46,47]. Accordingly, the near normalisation of blood glucose is essential to the treatment plan, and extreme fluctuations in it should, ideally, be minimised [47,48]. The face-to-face interaction between diabetes patients and clinicians does not often exceed two hours in a year, while for the rest of the time, patients and/or families are left to care for this complex disease on their own [46]. Despite being effective, engagement and compliance to self-care behaviours are generally low [46]. The way IPE and IPC may positively impact diabetes outcomes could either be through patients becoming more empowered to improve their DSM after being taught the basics of DSM and the available support by IPC teams or by being cared for in centres where IPC is common practice [25,26,32], which, in turn, influences specific patient behaviours that impact diabetes outcomes.
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/diabetology4030030