Abstract

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic disease that is increasing globally and leads to several morbidities. Early detection, diagnosis, and management of diabetes can reduce the associated co-morbidities and increase the quality of life of patients. The care and examination of diabetes must be according to recent diabetes guidelines, adherence of physicians to such guidelines in examination, testing and management is varied among different countries. This study was done to review the level of adherence of primary health care physicians to the diabetic guidelines. Online search using PubMed database and Google scholar was performed to search for original articles related to the current subject. The search process was done using several keywords to obtain all possible trials. The included articles were summarized in one table under specific titles, including author and year of publication, study design, country of the study, adherence rate, factors associated with adherence, results, and main findings. The general adherence was slow among physicians and factors associated with the adherence rate varied between the studies and were dependent on several factors.

Key words: Physicians, adherence, diabetes, guidelines, primary health care.