Interdisciplinary Focus of CHS
The key focus of the Centre for Health and Society (CHS) is the inter-disciplinary study of health, illness and health care in local, national and international settings. The Centre is unique in its integration of a variety of humanities and social sciences perspectives on health, disease and health care delivery, and uses disciplinary approaches from the history of health and medicine, medical anthropology, health ethics, sociology of health and illness, and health policy analysis. The following gives a brief description of the key disciplines within the centre.
Sociology of Health and Illness
Sociology is a critical discipline that has traditionally endeavoured to bridge theory and practice. Its interests include the relationship between health and gender, ageing, sexuality, class and ethnicity. It also encompasses the broad areas of health care practice, shaping of medical knowledge, health promotion, health and technology, illness narratives, medical work, and medical and professional authority in health care. Underlying these diverse areas are issues of distribution and inequality, concerns shared by sociologists in other fields.
The sociologists of health and illness at the Centre are committed to a reflexive practice that challenges what is often taken for granted. Questions such as what we mean by 'social', equality and justice, the body, and illness inform their research. Current areas of interest and investigation within sociology of health and illness at the Centre include gender and health, with particular focus on gender and heart disease, shaping of medical practices and technologies, development of global medicine and the application of human rights analyses to experiences of health and illness.
Health Policy Analysis
This growing area of interest within the Centre draws on contributions from political science and sociology. Health policy analysis includes: public policy and models of the policy process; governmental and administrative institutions and arrangements in public health; the politics of health; professions and health policy; comparative health care systems; and health care reform. Staff at the Centre who work in this area analyse contemporary health policy making in Australia and other OECD countries, and are specifically interested in primary health care policy and Aboriginal health policy. Current projects focus on governance and organisational networks, and the health professions.
History of Health and Medicine
The history of health and medicine ranges from the history of medical thought, practice, culture and politics, to the history of human health and disease, and of their social and cultural impacts and meanings. It is a vibrant international discipline comprising scholars and students from around the world, who are united in their focus on the history of humanity's struggle with sickness and mortality. It is a branch of history which is also connected to a many other areas of interest such as colonial and post-colonial history, women's history, history of the body, religion and magic, science and technology - to name a few.
All human activities of the past can claim the interest of historians, but history of health and medicine asks some of the most fundamental historical questions: How have human beings and their cultures dealt with sickness, suffering and death? How have they explained the great mysteries of human existence? How have they understood and treated madness and difference? What has been the health experience of people in the past? How have the facts of life changed over time and from place to place?
History is about life, and the history of health and medicine explores what that has meant for people of the past and helps us understand what it means now.
Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology is the study of health, illness and medical knowledge systems in different cultural settings. There are a number of different theoretical approaches within the discipline. Applied medical anthropology is usually directed towards health improvement in non-Western and developing countries, although it is also used to benefit minority groups within industrialised countries. In these cases it is often conducted in a complementary way with the disciplines of epidemiology, socio-economic studies, demography and medical science. Often the emphasis in applied medical anthropology is on the relationship between indigenous, 'traditional' and Western health systems, with the practical goal of facilitating health care in communities where medical services are being introduced, changed or developed.
At a more theoretical level, anthropologies of the body, experience, psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, as well as feminist theory, discourse analysis, and cultural studies inform new approaches to the discipline. Medical anthropologists also draw upon more 'traditional' anthropological analyses such as those of symbol systems, religion and performance to understand the experience of sickness and its expression cross-culturally.
Health beliefs are the product of distinct cultural, historical and political contexts and medical anthropology seeks to understand particular notions of ill-health, curing, help-seeking and sickness management within these larger knowledge systems. Medical anthropology problematises all medical systems, including those that prevail in Western industrial societies, and the scholarly investigation of the social, cultural and historical construction of medicine as a science is enhanced through comparative approaches.
Health Ethics
Health ethics (or bioethics as it is often known) is a field of study that has emerged as a recognised discipline over the past 20 years. In Australia it has grown largely out of moral philosophy, although it also has strong links with law.
Health ethics is primarily a normative discipline; it does not seek simply to describe health practices, but rather to ask whether these are ethically good practices. Health ethics offers an analytic framework for evaluating critically the current practices of health care and for developing better practices.
The interests of health ethics are broad. They range from the everyday ethical nuances of the practitioner-patient relationship to policy issues associated with public health and the allocation of health care resources. Other areas include autonomy and informed consent, reproductive and genetic technologies, and euthanasia. One of the current areas of investigation in health ethics within the Centre is ethics education for health care professionals. Other issues currently receiving significant research attention are resource allocation, cloning, prenatal diagnosis, the relationship between moral theory and practice, decision making and informed consent.