The Family Health Cycle : From Concept to Implementation
For children in developing countries, health outcomes are determined largely by decisions made within the household, by the family and the mother and father, in particular. From infancy to adulthood, parents provide (or fail to provide) everything...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2001/10/3916764/family-health-cycle-concept-implementation http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13719 |
| Summary: | For children in developing countries,
health outcomes are determined largely by decisions made
within the household, by the family and the mother and
father, in particular. From infancy to adulthood, parents
provide (or fail to provide) everything from nutrition and
shelter to education and health care. The family is also
typically the source of care and support for older people,
who in turn often contribute to care of children. The
authors develop a model for placing public health policies
and programs in the context of the family and the outside
forces that influence a family's decisions. This
life-cycle model, which is called the "family health
cycle," connects children, mothers, fathers, and
grandparents in a system that, as a whole, shapes the health
of individual family members. The model starts with the
birth of a child, who passes through the first stage of the
cycle as an infant boy or girl, becomes a child, and reaches
adolescence. At this stage, the person is biologically
"eligible" to pass through another stage of the
cycle as a parent, and then, barring early adult mortality
or childlessness of the offspring, can cycle through the
system once again as a grandparent. Each stage carries with
it age- and gender-specific health risks, and thus calls for
different health interventions. Interventions at each stage
can be viewed as inputs to help the individual survive (and
benefit from lower morbidity) until the next stage, when new
intervention inputs are required. This framework helps
identify which kinds of interventions- biomedical, social,
economic, environmental-are likely to be most effective at
each stage of the cycle. It thus has the potential to
improve understanding of the linkages among the many
interventions available and help put scarce public health
resources to better use. Finally, the authors review how the
family health cycle approach - or the "life-cycle
" approach as it is more commonly called in World Bank
analysis and operations - has been used for programming and
policy development in different contexts beyond maternal and
early childhood health: in developing poverty reduction
strategies, in conducting risk assessments for social
protection initiatives, in linking school health with health
and nutrition interventions in other age groups, and in
nutrition programming. |
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