Evaluation of an Urban Phase of the Specialized Care Program for Diabetes in Iran: Providers’ Perspectives

BACKGROUND: To develop and implement more effective programs of health care delivery to prevent and control diabetes, Iran has developed and implemented the urban phase of the specialized care program for diabetic's patients. Deeply understanding the views and experiences of various stakeholders in this program can assist policy makers to identify the program's strengths and weaknesses and enable them to develop action plans. Hence, the present study aimed to evaluate the planning and establishing of this program from the perspective of providers. METHODS: A qualitative study was applied using documents review and face-to-face semi-structured interviews with the program leads and relevant executive managers of the local medical universities. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Three main themes and nine subthemes were explored, including program planning (the content and the strengths, weaknesses, and corrective measures), implementation (executive mechanisms at the university level, establishment of referral system, collaboration between deputies of health and treatment, information dissemination mechanisms, satisfaction measurement and strengths, weaknesses and corrective measures), and result (implementation results). CONCLUSIONS: The urban phase of the specialized care program for diabetic's patients has been a good base to improve continuity of care, which emphasizes on controlling and prevention of occurrence or progression of chronic complications of diabetes. This model can also be used for better management of other chronic disease. However, there are still issues that should be considered and improved such as allocation of guaranteed resources, more trained health professionals, and more evidence based guidelines and protocols, better collaboration among medical universities’ deputies, clearer payment system for program evaluation and better information management system.