Dear Colleagues,

Type 2 diabetes is one of the most frequent chronic diseases worldwide. Its prevention and treatment comprise different parts and professions within the health care and social sector. However, in real life, a lot of data, episodes and studies suggest that interprofessional collaboration is rarely ever practiced.

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) means two or more other health/social care professions and the patient(s) working together to achieve the goal to improve or maintain a person’s health. It can be differentiated from multi-professional work through the individualized interaction between the different professionals to better understand/integrate/empower the patient’s situation (needs, opportunities, challenges, etc.). Furthermore, it includes shared decision-making and being adaptive to a single situation of an individual with type 2 diabetes, such as his/her self-management capabilities, clinical parameters, medication adherence, disposition towards change, lifestyle, and other obstacles/challenges. Currently, diabetes care is often considered to be not patient-centered and individualized enough, as well as often focused on the ideal-type improvement of clinical parameters. There are good chances that IPC could improve this situation.

Reeves et al. (Reeves, Lewin, Espin, and Zwarenstein 2010; Reeves, Xyrichis, and Zwarenstein 2018) have proposed a contingency approach, which means that IPC can be practiced as 1) teamwork (closest form of collaboration), 2) coordination, 3) collaboration, or 4) networking. From the same authors’ perspective, it is important to know that IPC has relational, organizational, contextual, and processual factors that are influenced by and influence different levels (micro, meso, and macro). Within the last few years, there are moves towards a unified definition/concept of IPC, and mentioned in particular is the interPACT tool of Xyrichis et al. (Xyrichis, Reeves, and Zwarenstein 2018).

Interprofessional collaboration in community health care focusing on the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes is the scope of this Special Issue. Empirical papers (on IPC) on diabetes care, in particular focusing on outcome variables such as health behavior, behavior change, quality of interaction, and not mainly clinical parameters/results, are of special interest. Additionally, manuscripts that present models of care based on different intensities/forms of IPC would be very welcome. We especially encourage mixed methods studies to be submitted, but also quantitative or qualitative papers are appreciated

Dr. Heike Wieser
Prof. Dr. Harald Stummer
Guest Editors

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• health care
• social and community
• interprofessional collaboration
• prevention and treatment