Why Family Healthcare Is Important.

Family healthcare is a form of primary healthcare that’s made easily assessable, and available within every stratum of the community at a cheap cost.

The Family health clinic via health care professionals provides holistic, complete, and compassionate care for you and every member of your family, including men and women, newborns, children, and the elderly.

There are some components of family healthcare, even as it is a branch under primary health, and thus, it also fulfills the principles of primary health care.

What Is Primary Health Care?

To help people to make healthy lifestyle choices for them and their family with information for every stage of their lives, primary healthcare was developed. It is the first level of contact for individuals, their family, and their community with the national health system and is responsible for addressing the main health problems found in the community, providing health promotion, and also preventive, curative, and rehabilitative services.

What Does Family Healthcare Entail?

In 1980, the US Bureau of Census-defined the family as a ‘’group of two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together in a household”.

Hence, ‘’a state of positive interaction between family members which enable each member of the family to enjoy optimum physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being.” Is known and understood as Family Healthcare.

The family functions in the following ways, some of which overlap with one another:

• Socialization amongst family members.
• Fulfilling sexual needs and desires.
• Taking care of dependent members.
• Providing emotional support for members.
• Alleviating economic stability.
• Satisfaction of all social, intellectual, emotional, and psychological needs of members.

What Are The Determinants Of Family Health Care?

The Houston Methodist Primary Care Physicians group advocates greatly for family healthcare. The family health care clinic in Houston, 77042 and headed by Dr. Smitha Mantha, suggests that the following are the determinants of family health care.

They are:

• Living and working conditions
• Physical environment,
• Psycho-social environment
• Education and economic factors
• health practices
• Cultural factors
• Gender etc.

Components Of Family Health Care.

The components of family health or its scope are discussed in brief below:

1. Problems faced by family: Family health attends to the issues of broken homes, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, disability and rehabilitation, unmarried mothers, teenage pregnancy all of which stem from peer pressure of irresponsible parenting.

2. Reproductive health: Reproductive health is an important component of Primary HealthCare and also Family Health. It attends to the following:

• Safe motherhood, ANC, delivery care, PNC, Family planning, Nutritional deficiencies, LBW
• STIs/RTIs/HIV/AIDS, legal abortion, infertility services,
• Adolescent health (suicide, depression, STIs)

3. Child health: Especially in third war or low-income countries, there’s much emphasis on the management of the child and his/her health. This includes and is not limited to:

• Childbearing, rearing,
• Child health services: nutrition, immunization, growth monitoring
• Mortality and mortality of children
• Social problems of children: That is, Child abuse, Abandoned or street children, Child labor, Juvenile delinquency, and battered baby syndrome.

4. Gender issues in the family: Gender issues are another important factor under family health care. This is because cases of Girl’s trafficking, Gender mainstreaming, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), female feticide (sex-selective abortion), have skyrocketed in recent times at a very alarming rate.

5. Aging: Problems of aging, active aging which brings with it chronic systemic diseases like hypertension, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, etc.

Importance And Benefits Of Family Health Care.

Advances in medicine have made people become more able to have an increased exact understanding of the conditions our relatives have or had, and by carefully assessing and archiving that information, we are better able to understand our relative susceptibility to these conditions.

Visiting the doctor for the first time, and you’d be asked to give a history of your medical problems, the history of medical problems in close family members even as well as those that may have been present in distant relatives going back two generations at least.

This way, thus helps us to be able to prevent or intervene early upon certain conditions that otherwise would interfere with the quality of life. Small symptoms which may otherwise have been overlooked can paint an entirely different picture when your health care provider already knows what to look for, thanks to the mapping of family history provided upon your initial consult.