Role of anthropological and qualitative approaches in health management

Vinay Tripathi

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”¹. The definition underlines the significance of having multi-disciplinary perspective while providing healthcare services or tackling health related issues. The health management is one such discipline which amalgamates multidisciplinary approaches and orientations while dealing with heath and its related issues. The insights gained from anthropological and qualitative approaches are very critical in the domain of health management as it allows health managers to understand the behavioural and attitudinal orientations of the stakeholders and accordingly develop appropriate strategies to seek their proactive involvement in addressing the health related issues.

The stakeholders are across the healthcare continuum: starting from policy to advocacy to implementation level. Let us elaborate with an example. The healthcare system of any country designs number of interventions to ensure that different health programmes reaches to its target population without any hindrance. A healthcare manager who is oriented towards the anthropological and qualitative methodological learning would use the learning while conceptualizing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating these interventions. Taking another example from the policy perspective, a health manager equipped with anthropological and methodological learning would aid the policy makers in understanding the cultural context of the people and how it influences, both positively and negatively, the policy and vice versa.

The learning imparts skills to understand minute details and having holistic understanding of health problems issues and scope to view issues from different perspective and possibly the out of box solution to the healthcare leaders and providers

¹Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948