Challenges and Opportunities for Diabetes Care in Indigenous People: A Scoping Review

Diabetes mellitus in indigenous people has increased globally. This disease develops very quickly and has a higher prevalence among indigenous people. When caring for diabetes, indigenous people face many obstacles that worsen their condition. However, only a few studies have comprehensively reviewed such a condition and investigated various tribal backgrounds of indigenous people. This study aimed to identify diverse challenges and opportunities in caring for diabetes in indigenous people.

This scoping review was conducted from March to August 2022 by searching for manuscripts on PubMed, Science Direct, Cochrane Library, Wiley, Directory of Open Access Journals, ProQuest, GARUDA, and Grey Literature databases to identify challenges and opportunities in caring for diabetes mellitus in indigenous people. Three reviewers independently screened the results, and the extracted data were then mapped, categorized, and summarized.

This study identified eight categories of challenges and three opportunities. Trust, language, health literacy, access to health services, and costs are challenges for indigenous people in caring for diabetes. In addition, three aspects were considered opportunities to care for diabetes in indigenous people: support from health workers who are from the indigenous communities to solve trust issues, intervention modification based on culture, language, and technology, and support from health authorities.

Challenges to the indigenous people’s religious and cultural factors should be addressed seriously to care for diabetes. However, this action requires different approaches and cannot be generalized to all indigenous communities.