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Making sense of families, households and care

Bernhard M. Gaede
South African Family Practice | Vol 62, No 1 : Part 4| a5192 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/safp.v62i1.5192 | © 2020 Bernhard Gaede | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 14 July 2020 | Published: 10 December 2020

About the author(s)

Bernhard M. Gaede, Department of Family Medicine, College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Abstract

The book – Connected Lives: Families, households, health and care in South Africa (edited by Nolwazi Mkhwanazi and Lenore Manderson)1 – is about some of the core business of family medicine. In primary healthcare, and family medicine in particular, the context of the person being treated is central. The evolving understanding of social determinants of health and disease, the linkages between biological illness with social, nutritional, environmental and political context are increasingly important. These shifts require health practitioners to practice differently to how many have been trained traditionally, being challenged to be much more explicit in linking clinical care to the context of the person (‘patient’). Yet, it is this context that clinicians often struggle to understand how the family and households are constituted, how it ‘works’ and what the dynamics are.

Keywords

family; household; care

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