Introduction and aims: Diabetes is one of the chronic and prevalent diseases in the world. Diabetic patients' number has increased 7 times during last 20 years. If this current situation continues, diabetic patients' population will be 350 millions ones in 2030. It means that 7 millions people will be added annually. Up to now, different uncontrollable factors have been monitored in self-caring of this disease for managing and preventing from its early and late side effects. This research is conducted to study the role of self-efficacy as a determinant agent in self-caring of diabetic patients.
Study method: This is a narrative review study in which various information banks and search motors such as PubMed, ProQuest, SCOPUS, Elsevier were reviewed. Diabetes, self-care and self efficacy keywords from cross sectional, cohort, clinical experimental studies and systematic review were also used in the study construction. Iranian Banks such as IRANMEDEX, MEDLINE and also different articles from domestic research and scientific magazines were selected. Time spectrum of reviewed studies was supposed to be published from 1990 up to 2011.
Results: Self-care situation among diabetic patients not only is unsatisfactory but also the studies' results show that self-efficacy rate is low among them. The findings of the studies prove that there is a direct relation between self-efficacy and self-care in the patients in a way that this construct owns the predictability power of self-care behavior.
Conclusion: Self-caring has a significant role in controlling of diabetes disease. Self-efficacy can induce motivation directly take health promoting behavior through efficacy expectations. It also affects motivation, indirectly, through perceived barriers and determining commitment or stability for following function map. So, self-efficacy is very important in changing self-care behavior process.
Keywords: Diabetes; self-care; self-efficacy.