Collaboration between traditional practitioners and primary health care staff in South Africa: developing a workable partnership for community mental health services
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2010
TITLE AUTHOR(S): V.Campbell-Hall, I.Petersen, A.Bhana, S.Mjadu, V.Hosegood, A.J.Flisher
KEYWORDS: MENTAL HEALTH, PRIMARY HEALTH CARE, TRADITIONAL HEALERS, TRADITIONAL MEDICINE
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 6544
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/4072
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/4072
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
The majority of the black African population in South Africa utilize both traditional and public sector Western systems of healing for mental health care. There is a need to develop models of collaboration that promote a workable relationship between the two healing systems. The aim of this study was to explore perceptions of service users and providers of current interactions between the two systems of care and ways in which collaboration could be improved in the provision of community mental health services. Qualitative individual and focus group interviews were conducted with key health care providers and service users in one typical rural South African health sub-district. The majority of service users held traditional explanatory models of illness and used dual systems of care, with shifting between treatment modalities reportedly causing problems with treatment adherence. Traditional healers expressed a lack of appreciation from Western health care practitioners but were open to training in Western biomedical approaches and establishing a collaborative relationship in the interests of improving patient care. Western biomedically trained practitioners were less interested in such an arrangement. Interventions to acquaint traditional practitioners with Western approaches to the treatment of mental illness, orientation of Western practitioners towards a culture-centred approach to mental health care, as well as the establishment of fora to facilitate the negotiation of respectful collaborative relationships between the two systems of healing are required at district level to promote an equitable collaboration in the interests of improved patient care.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Integrating services, marginalizing patients: psychiatric patients and primary health care in South Africa
- Perspectives and practices of Xhosa-speaking African traditional healers when managing psychosis
- Utilization and practice of traditional/complementary/alternative medicine (TM/CAM) in South Africa
- Use of traditional and complementary health practices in prenatal, delivery and postnatal care in the context of HIV Transmission from Mother to Child (PMTCT) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
- Healing: the fever abates in South Africa
- Traditional health practitioners in South Africa
- Evaluation of a safer male circumcision training programme for Ndebele traditional surgeons and nurses in Gauteng, South Africa: using direct observation of circumcision procedures
- Implementing the World Health Report 2001 recommendations for integrating mental health into primary health care: a situation analysis of three African countries: Ghana, South Africa and Uganda
- A task shifting approach to primary mental health care for adults in South Africa: human resource requirements and costs for rural settings
- Traditional and alternative therapy for mental illness in Jamaica: patients' conceptions and practitioners' attitudes
- Lessons from case studies of integrating mental health into primary health care in South Africa and Uganda
- Medicine and the politics of knowledge
- Utilization and practice of traditional/complementary/alternative medicine (T/CAM) in Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) member states
- Decline of common mental disorders over time in public primary care tuberculosis patients in South Africa
- A student-facilitated community-based support group initiative for mental health care users in a primary health care setting
- Primary health care in the era of HIV/AIDS. Some implications for health systems reform
- Clinical perspectives: strengthening infants and children: South African perspectives
- Impact of a mother-infant intervention in an indigent peri-urban South African context
- Putting HIV/AIDS counselling in South Africa in its place
- Monitoring alcohol and drug abuse trends in South Africa. Proceedings of South African Community Epidiology Network on Drug Use (SACENDU) report back meetings, March/April 2002; July-December 2001: Phase 11