Research progress on the intervention of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine nursing for diabetic foot.

Diabetic foot (DF) is a serious disabling, recurrent chronic complication of diabetes. While integrated Chinese-Western nursing for DF is widely studied, few systematic reviews frame relevant research based on the nursing process. This narrative review systematically retrieved literature from major Chinese and English databases up to December 2025, sorting included studies into nursing assessment, intervention and health education to assess evidence quality, analyze synergistic mechanisms of dual nursing modes, and verify their benefits in lowering amputation risk, accelerating wound repair and improving patients' quality of life. In assessment, Western nursing relies mainly on Wagner/Texas grading and ankle-brachial index detection. Western interventions center on debridement, dressing change and blood glucose management, matched with syndrome-differentiated TCM measures including herbal fumigation, acupoint massage and dietary conditioning; combined nursing outperforms single-mode care, yet timing and connection strategies remain unclear. Integrated foot self-management and dietary education are commonly used, though long-term efficacy and standardized pathways are debated. Existing research is evolving from efficacy observation to standardized protocol construction with an emerging "precise Western intervention+holistic TCM regulation" consensus. Major barriers include non-standardized TCM nursing operations, flawed study designs, and insufficient integrated clinical pathways instead of separate parallel implementation. This review constructs a nursing-process-based synthesis framework, pinpointing integration gaps across assessment, intervention and education to support subsequent evidence-based research. Future work should standardize TCM nursing operations, build nursing-sensitive indicators and launch multi-center cooperation, transforming empirical nursing into evidence-based practice. The summarized regimens can guide personalized nursing plan formulation and provide references for industry standardization and quality improvement.