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Type 2 diabetes mellitus has been assessed as a widespread disease globally. Unfortunately, this illness can occasionally go undetected and without symptoms until it reaches the emergency condition, and this can be notably true in patients who do not receive routine medical care. Pharmacists are the foremost accessible health care providers. They can help patients select the most appropriate hypoglycemic management strategy through their experiences. This review aimed to provide an overview of the literature published on community pharmacists' interventions that are currently used and their usefulness in improving patient adherence and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels. Relevant studies were retrieved through a comprehensive search of three databases, PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, and CINAHL (2010 to 2020). In total, 8362 publications were identified. The final protocol was based on the "Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA)". After applying inclusion and exclusion measures, 21 articles were deemed relevant. In pharmacists' interventions in diabetes care, patient education and counseling were the most common intervention methods. Essentially, this systematic review provides evidence and identifies the key features that may predict success in enhancing clinical outcomes and patient adherence to treatment. Based on our findings, we suggest further investigations of the root causes of non-adherence problems.

Introduction: We reviewed and compared current drug shortages and shortage management practices in six selected countries (Hungary, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, United States) based on the most comprehensive national shortage databases for each country, for four Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) groups, to analyze the criticality of drug shortages across countries and identify best practices in shortage management strategies., Materials and Methods: Countries were selected to cover a wide geographical range of high-income nations where a lack of economic power as a potential source of drug shortages is not observable. ATC groups were selected based on a pre-examination of the databases to analyze groups most often in shortage, and groups where the absence of which could have a severe negative impact on treatment outcomes. The bias originating from the different reporting systems had to be reduced to gain comprehensive and comparable information. The first bias-reducing mechanism was transforming the raw number of shortages into proportion per million people. Secondly, critical cases were classified, and thirdly, critical cases were compared with the Word Health Organization (WHO) Essential Medicine Lists., Results: The results indicate that every European country studied reports significantly higher total and critical shortages per population compared to the US and Australia. Within Europe, Hungary reports the highest number of cases both for total and critical shortages, while Spain has the lowest results in both aspects. While in the US and Australia critical shortages were observable in similar proportions across all ATC groups, in European countries ATC groups of anti-infectives for systemic use (J) and the nervous system (N) were found to account for a notably higher proportion of critical shortages. Current shortage management practices were examined in each country and classified into five groups to identify common best practices., Conclusions: Due to the different characterization of reporting systems, several bias-reducing mechanisms should be applied to compare and evaluate shortages. In addition, European harmonization should be initiated to create mutually acknowledged definitions and reporting systems, which could be the basis of good drug shortage handling practices in Europe.