A systematic review of barriers and enablers that health professionals experience to the delivery of type 2 diabetes care for adults with severe mental illness.

BACKGROUND: People with severe mental illness have a heightened risk for type 2 diabetes. They also experience poorer outcomes, including more diabetes complications, more emergency admissions, lower quality of life and excess mortality.

AIMS: This systematic review aimed to identify health professionals' barriers to and enablers of delivering and organising type 2 diabetes care for people with severe mental illness.

METHODS: Searches were conducted in Medline, EMBASE, PsycInfo, CINAHL, OVID Nursing, Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, OpenGrey, PsycExtra, Health Management Information Consortium and Ethos in March 2019, with updates in September 2019 and January 2023. There were no restrictions on study design, but studies were excluded if they did not include the perspective of health professionals or were not in English. Barriers and/or enablers of type 2 diabetes care for people with a severe mental illness were organised using the theoretical domains framework with additional inductive thematic coding.

RESULTS: Twenty-eight studies were included in the review. Overall, eight domains were identified as important with barriers and enablers identified at individual, interpersonal and organisational levels.

CONCLUSIONS: Focussing on providing a collaborative healthcare environment which actively supports type 2 diabetes care, fostering improved communication both between professionals and service users, ensuring clear boundaries around roles and responsibilities as well as individual skill and knowledge support alongside confidence building all offer opportunities to improve type 2 diabetes care.