Objective:

Identify facilitators and barriers to implementing Meta Salud Diabetes program, an educational intervention designed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in people with diabetes who participate in Grupos de Ayuda Mutua [Self-help groups] organized by the Ministry of Health in northern Mexico.

Materials and methods:

This is a qualitative study based on Normalization Process Theory, mainly the “contribution” construct, which analyzes information describing the experience of health personnel in charge of implementing the intervention in four health care centers selected for this article. Data sources include contact logs with Grupos de Ayuda Mutua facilitators and reports from feedback meetings, field notes from non-participant observation of the Meta Salud Diabetes sessions and semi-structured interviews.

Results:

Meta Salud Diabetes was succesfully implemented for 13 weeks in the health care centers selected for this study. Facilitators recognized its usefulness as an educational model that improves the self-care practices of people with diabetes. The importance of institutional support for the implementation of Meta Salud Diabetes was also documented.

Conclusions:

Future implementation of the program requires the systematic allocation of resources to the Grupos de Ayuda Mutua, recognition of the work of those who coordinate them, improvement of supervision processes, employing of more staff and collaboration between different health professionals. Using Normalization Process Theory to analyze agentic contribution allowed us to identify the factors that facilitated or hindered the implementation of Meta Salud Diabetes in the studied groups. However, a limitation of this type of study is the difficulty of isolating the specific impact on different agents.

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