Introduction: It has been established that the psychosocial skills of patients need to be strengthened in the context of therapeutic patient education, to help them to more effectively manage their disease and the associated treatments. This intervention is barely feasible at the present time because of unresolved conceptual, methodological and operational problems, particularly problems concerning the identification and evaluation of the psychosocial skills to be developed.
Objectives: This study established an inventory of psychosocial skills targeted by educational intervention, and identified the criteria used to demonstrate acquisition of these skills.
Method: A systematic review of the literature was performed on 60 articles dealing with evaluation of educational intervention in patients with diabetes.
Results: Skills were identified in one quarter of these articles. They referred to communication and interpersonal relations, decision-making and critical thinking, and also to coping and self-management. These articles used more often used medical endpoints than psychosocial endpoints.
Discussion: Psychosocial skills are poorly explained and poorly evaluated. Interventions, often based on a biomedical approach, focus more on self-care skills. The paper concludes on the importance of developing a psychosocial approach to provide a better conceptualization of the notion of social skills.