Ann Community Med Public Health | Volume 1, Issue 1 | Review Article | Open Access
Rajamohanan Pillai K*, Namitha P and Rema Devi S
Health Policy and Planning Studies, Kerala University of Health Sciences, India
*Correspondance to: Rajamohanan Pillai K
Fulltext PDFIntroduction: This review article describes the conceptual highlights, issues in clinical practice and challenges in exploring the concept of changing families in public health and clinical medicine. Objectives: To describe the current knowledge in the areas of academic aspects of family health as evidenced from current literature and to enlighten about the implications of this knowledge to the clinical community and public health practitioners. Materials and Methods: Review of literature done for the last ten years. In addition to manual search of published articles and books, electronic search using Google and PubMed were used. The literature confined to public health domain is essentially looked for. The reference period for search was five years. Results and Discussion: Conceptual issues like definition of family, changing family, health is discussed first. Attributes of family like family dynamics, family environment are discussed in the context of clinical practice and public health. Selected issues regarding changing families for the physician and public health practitioner are highlighted. Major criticisms about health system functioning and the importance studies on changing families to surmount these has been discussed. Changing Concept of Family in Clinical Practice: Family level analysis as part of clinic-social case work up, family level resource mapping for care plan, (concept of family safety-net), Families in distress and risk for disease, family focused interventions in primary health care, chronic disease management, care of psychiatric illness are the points discussed. Foreseen Challenges: The challenges noted are challenges in access and universal health care, achieving prevention and health promotion through family focused interventions in the community, involvement of family in care of chronically ill and the acute illness especially pandemics and maintaining the family safety-net and neighborhood support groups. Conclusion: The importance of knowledge updating of the physician and nursing professional about family health and family involvement in health care is described. The important challenges in integrating studies on changing families to clinical and public health practice are listed. A theoretical model illustrating the process elements and outcomes of concept of changing family is presented.
Family; Family dynamics; Creative partnership model
Rajamohanan Pillai K, Namitha P, Rema Devi S. Concept of Family and Its Importance in Clinical Practice. Ann Community Med Public Health. 2021; 1(1): 1005..