Timor-Leste Health Care Seeking Behaviour Study - Secretaria de ...

Appendix 5 – User blame of provider; extract from FGDThis FGD extract elaborates the issue of user blame of provider although in this case the provider is aperson knowledgeable in traditional medicine (ai moruk nain). The contributions elaborate thatblaming a provider for a negative outcome is an enduring Timorese cultural response, and that atraditional provider at least will wait to be invited to attend to a sick person, rather than initiatetreatment. The implication is that if a negative outcome results, the fact that a provider was calledby the family of the patient may lessen the blame directed at the provider, whereas if the providerthemselves initiated treatment resulting in a negative outcome the blame is greater. (Note howeverthat there is also argument that intervention by any provider whether called or not that results inthe death of the patient results in the same accusation of blame by the family of the patient towardsthe provider.)So, who made the decision to take the woman to deliver at the hospital after four days [oflabour]?#1: Sometimes people who are knowledgeable about traditional medicine give medicine that doesnot cure, that causes more suffering for the ill person/child and causes anger [e.g. in the parent].They say: ‘it was you who gave your medicine and made the child like this, if you hadn’t given thechild would not have become like this.’ Actually, it is like this, we ask for help and trust in them[knowledgeable people] and then you call them [the parent of the ill child], another person cannotcall them [to attend your child]. This is something [results in] casting blame.#2: So, this is bad Timorese practice [it is as though] your child was OK but because you broughtthem and had this bad treatment it caused them to become like this and then we suspect oneanother, quarrel, and use sorcery [habuan malu] against each other. We store a grudge: supposingthat person did not go and call that person and they did not come – it was the medicine whichcaused the child to become like this. Whereas the person [a knowledgeable person] went there tohelp the child become well but because of something you gave, and did not cure the child, youthen blame that person and you store a grudge against that person because of that. Sometimesthis happens and because of this if a person does not call [a knowledgeable person] they will notcome because if the child [or ill person] dies of something then this results in a quarrel til death.Like healers, if you don’t call them they are not brave enough to comeTwo married men, FGD, CovalimaTimor-Leste Health Care Seeking Behaviour Study | 200966