Back to the future: 25 years of ‘Guidelines for encouraging psychological well‐being’ among people affected by diabetes

In a special issue of this Journal in 1994, a Working Group of the WHO IDF St Vincent's Declaration Action Programme for Diabetes published a seminal guideline [1] that made seven recommendations for encouraging psychological well-being among people living with diabetes (Table 1). Our key observation is that the guideline has stood the test of time, and is as commendable today as it was 25 years ago. Most, if not all, contemporary clinical diabetes guidelines include a focus on psychological care (Table 2). However, whereas the 1994 guideline focused on encouraging and monitoring 'psychological well-being', today's guidelines focus on psychological problems. The key exception is the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) publication Global Guideline for Type 2 Diabetes [2]. Perhaps, it is the nature of resource-limited health systems to take a problem-focused approach.