Question

How do you see your role in Family Health Promotion? Give an example of how you have promoted health in a family, as a professionally or as a non-healthcare professional

Answer 1

Ans) Family-focused interventions have multiple aims. They are intended to help family members agree on and collaborate in a program of disease management in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and operational style. Helping family members manage stress by preventing the disease from dominating family life and sacrificing normal developmental and personal goals is also important.

- Interventions help the family deal with the losses that chronic disease can create, mobilize the family's natural support system, provide education and support for family members, and reduce the social isolation and the resulting anxiety and depression accompanying disease management.

- Finally, interventions can provide new structure for the family, with adjustments of roles and expectations if needed, to ensure optimal patient self-care.

- Studies of interventions that involve family members are more common in diseases of children than in diseases of adults. Most family-focused intervention studies of children's diseases have been conducted with groups of patients or groups of family members, not with whole families.

- Interventions have focused more on adherence to treatment and metabolic control than on family-behavior variables or family processes themselves. However, a few studies demonstrate improved family relationships associated with better health outcome.

- Results suggest that interventions focused on family relationships, rather than education of individual family members, might be a fruitful approach to improving the management of various chronic diseases in children and adolescents. Research on family interventions for management of chronic diseases in adults and the elderly is in its infancy and careful attention is needed to develop realistic and systematic trials. The available data suggest that recognizing and attending to the family relationship context adds considerably to improving the health and well-being of patients and family members struggling with the management of a chronic disease.

- An increase in complexity occurs when a shift is made from addressing only the individual patient to addressing the broader social context in which the patient lives and in which the disease is managed. Accompanying the increased complexity, however, is the need to increase the flexibility of intervention approaches, the number of methods of intervention, and the number of risk and protective factors that are targeted for change so that the potential for effecting substantive improvement can be realized.