Review article
Family and chronic illness
Ines Diminić-Lisica
; Department of family medicine, Faculty of medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Ika Rončević-Gržeta
; Department of psychiatry and psychological medicine, Faculty of medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
Modern medical practice is faced with increasing number of people with chronic
diseases. Chronic illness affects standard family dynamics. Reaction of the family faced with
a chronic illness of their member depends on the unique balance of family members and
relations between them. Family dynamics refers to the type and model of the family, meanings,
beliefs and rituals, life cycle stage in which the family is at the time of dealing with
chronic disease as well as basic aspects of functioning including cohesiveness, adaptability,
communication and organization of the family. Chronic patient, and his family members,
have to adapt their former way of life to the demands of illness, including psychological adjustment.
In a family which is faced with the disease of one of its members initially dominates
negation, the next phase is depression and mourning, then they slowly accept the situation
and it replaces the former relations with new quality relations. Functional family is
flexible and is able to adapt their dynamics to find space for a disease with simultaneous
work on the goals, routines and rituals that it had before the incidence of the disease. In the
process of chronic diseases treatment, it’s necessary to actively involve family members.
Studies showed that family-oriented treatment of chronic diseases is an improvement in
treatment over traditional treatment of a disease-oriented or individual- oriented treatement,
both regarding the results of treatment and outcome of disease and in relation to
economic criteria.
Keywords
chronic illness; coping with illness; family
Hrčak ID:
59255
URI
Publication date:
13.9.2010.
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