Barriers and Facilitators to Diabetes Self-Care Among Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: A Mixedmethods Systematic Review Protocol

Diabetes self-care remains central to glycaemic control, complication prevention, quality of life, and long-term health-system sustainability. Recent evidence indicates that diabetes selfmanagement support can improve selected clinical and behavioural outcomes, yet the literature remains fragmented across intervention types, psychosocial determinants, family and social support, health-literacy factors, structural barriers, and digital care models. This protocol foundation proposes a mixed-methods systematic review focused on barriers and facilitators to diabetes self-care among adults with type 2 diabetes. The review is designed to retrieve and screen a minimum of 150 recent peer-reviewed studies published from 2021 onward across PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO. The planned review will map the evidence landscape, identify empirical and implementation-sensitive determinants of self-care, assess methodological and contextual gaps, and generate a publishable synthesis relevant to clinical practice, programme design, and policy. Eligibility criteria, search architecture, study-selection procedures, data-extraction variables, qualityappraisal methods, and mixed-methods synthesis plans are specified in line with PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-P guidance. The protocol is structured to support submission to a Scopus-indexed journal and prospective registration in PROSPERO, where eligible. Important scope note. This document is a protocol-ready foundation informed by current high-quality guidelines and representative recent review evidence. It provides a search architecture deliberately calibrated to retrieve a minimum of 150 recent peer-reviewed studies on diabetes self-care/self-management published from 2021 to the search date in 2026 across multiple databases, with scope for a larger yield after database-specific expansion, citation chaining, and deduplication. Because a full database export, deduplication log, and title/abstract screening archive are not available inside this workspace, the evidence map below is a rigorous protocol-facing synthesis of current evidence signals rather than a line-by-line appendix of 150 individually screened records.