Primary Health Care - JOHN J. HADDAD, Ph.D.

Introduction 15
Psychology
Epidemiology
Biomedical
sciences
The clinician–patient
relationship
Sociology
Anthropology
Philosophy
and ethics
PRIMARY HEALTH CARE
Arts and
literature
Pedagogy
Quality assurance
and improvement
Evidence-based practice
Information management
Co-ordination of care
Research
Resource allocation
Teaching, training and
professional development
Figure 1.1 Primary health care: underpinning disciplines (upper half) and key themes in
contemporary practice (lower half).
fit together (see Section 1.3) and a more or less agreed approach to research
design (immunologists, for example, do experiments on rabbits, whereas historians
study ancient manuscripts and philosophers discuss premises and
what can be deduced from them). Within each theoretical discipline, scholars
generally agree about the main research questions and about what counts
as good (or poor) research. Until recently – with a few notable exceptions –
scholars from different primary disciplines rarely exchanged ideas with one
another. ‖
The second sorts of discipline – secondary or applied – focus on problems
rather than concepts and theories. Scholars in secondary disciplines consider
real-world issues from many different angles, drawing eclectically on the different
primary disciplines to address different dimensions of the problem.
Examples of secondary disciplines include business studies (which draws on
economics, marketing, anthropology and organisational theory), education
(which draws on learning theory, linguistics and psychology) and primary
health care, whose underpinning disciplines are illustrated in Figure 1.1.
‖ Philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of a paradigm (a particular scientific
approach characterised by four things: concepts, theories, methods and instruments). 17 If
you are interested in the philosophical basis of different approaches to primary care, I
recommend Kuhn’s book, which is short, inspiring and easy to follow.