Impact of Family Care on Health
Family Health,Factors Affecting the Family Health,Guidelines for Family as Health
Family Health
No universal definition of family has been
adopted by the legal and social systems, family scientists , or the clinical
disciplines that work with or study families. How the family is defined
determines the factors that will be examined to evaluate the health of
individual family members and the family unit.
In addition to the biological
family, when examining health in the context of the family, the family can be
defined as constituting the group of persons acting together to perform
functions required for the survival, growth, safety, socialization , and health
of family members.
These functions include supporting health and caring for ill
and disabled members. Research on health has focused primarily at the level of
the individual and has demonstrated the interdependence between the health of
the individual family members and the family ( Feetham , 1999).
Factors Affecting the Family Health
Factors influencing family health include:
(a) Genetics.
(b) Physiological and psychological responses of individual family
members; (c) cultural influences.
(d) The physical, social, economic, and
political environments, including resources.
Researchers have shown that health
and risk factors cluster in families because members often have similar diets,
activity patterns , and behaviors, such as smoking and alcohol abuse, as well
as a common physical environment. Identification of healthy families has
focused on family interaction patterns, family problem solving, and patterns of
responses to changes in the family system.
These definitions and concepts of
family health provide a framework for determining measurable outcomes of family
health while also accounting for the diversity in family structure ( Feetham ,
1999, 2000).
In 2003 we entered the genomic era, with
findings from genomic research and advances in genetic technologies requiring a
reframing of how we think of the continuum of health and illness, and even the
concept of disease. The way in which diseases are categorized, and ultimately
how they are treated and managed, will change.
No longer named by their
symptoms (such as asthma), diseases will be more specifically identified by
knowing the genetic and environmental causes leading to more focused treatments
(Guttmacher & Collins, 2002).
Individuals and families will be faced with
reframing their concept and experience with diagnosis, treatment, and
prevention to include the term “generically linked disorder, with the
blurring of the boundary between health and illness (Feetham & Thomson, in
press). Genetic information may result in the need to extend the concept of
“illness time” phases to include knowledge of a risk state, or in
some cases, a pre symptomatic phase (Rolland, 1999; Street, E., & Soldan,
1998).
The risk state refers to the time before a statistical risk is known or
acknowledged or the point in time when symptoms occur.The risk state may
require interventions for individuals and families to respond to the increased
awareness of risk, new genetic risk information , or even the earliest
occurrence of symptoms.
Families may need to begin to deal with anticipatory
loss, accept increased surveillance, adhere to changes in health behaviors, or
accept interventions that may potentially delay the onset or progression of the
disease.
Guidelines for Family as Health
Effective interventions with families
incorporate an understanding of what health means to individual family members
and to the family as a unit, and how the environment influences their health
actions .
The family has been described as the primary social agent in the
promotion of health and well being; therefore, our knowledge of the family and
its relationship to the health of its individual members is central to research
related to health promotion and to families responding to risk information and
experiencing illness and disability.