Case Management and Record Keeping - Essay Sample

Case management is the coordinated and collaborative process that is used to plan, assess, implement, monitor, coordinate, control and evaluate the services and options that are needed to meets a persons healthcare and human service needs (Woodside & McClam, 2005). Case management enables and is a facilitator of the achievement of client wellness through advocacy, planning, assessment, reliable communication, education and information of clients, the management of resources and the facilitation of services. It can be inferred from the above statement that case management can be characterized by communication, advocacy, prudent and proper utilization of resources. The goal of successful case management is promoting the quality and the cost-effectiveness of the applied interventions and expected outcomes.

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The terms traditional or indigenous medicine are subjective as they categorized medicine from a rooted western context and was mostly introduced by British colonists in different parts of the English-speaking world to describe the practices that they met there, obviously with an egoistic view that only what they introduced was modern. According to the Australian Royal Commission for the Aboriginal peoples, traditional healing is defined as the practice designed to promote mental, spiritual and physical well-being that are based primarily on belief and which predates the spread of Western scientific biomedicine because Indigenous traditional healing can address the mental, spiritual and physical aspects of healing, it is considered as holistic (Yeh, Hunter, Madan-Bahel, Chiang & Arora, 2004).

There is no unified framework that defines and describes the scope of Indigenous traditional medicine because these factors largely rely on the society and culture in which the healing practices are being practiced in. Indigenous traditional healing is not a body of work that is buried in the past as the term traditional may imply, it is a living continuum of knowledge passed from one generation of healers to the next, often orally and continues to live and determine the management of many health cases worldwide. This paper aims to explore indigenous traditional healing practices and its practicability in case management in the modern conceptual framework of Western scientific biomedicine. By the end of this paper, it is hoped that the reader will have understood the dynamics and challenges of applying Indigenous traditional healing practices and knowledge in the concepts of established western medicine and the place of traditional healing practices of twenty-first century medical case management.

Indigenous traditional healing is founded of a body of knowledge. Because most Indigenous traditional healing systems are based on a belief by definition, the parent body of knowledge is often sacred and the healing is practiced in a sacred place. It is important for the health practitioner to acquire a working knowledge of the attendant culture of the traditional health system they may come into contact with to fully understand the significance and the premises for the actions taken by traditional healers to address particular health conditions. For a modern health worker to successfully gel into a traditional healing framework, they must fully appreciate and respect the sanctity of traditional healing practices for the indigenous peoples. In attempting to incorporate indigenous traditional healing practices into the modern conceptual and theoretical case management formulae, one must understand the sacred significance of traditional healing practices and acknowledge the role of these in promoting the spiritual, mental and physical well-being of the indigent, or non-indigent patient.

To fully integrate indigenous traditional healing into modern medical case management strategies, it is also important to build knowledge of the working and understanding of the indigenous language in which the traditional healing practice is practiced. Language is defined as low a community encodes knowledge (Robbins & Dewar, 2011). The practitioner should correctly place the language used at the place of practice in the correct and elegant context to get a full understanding of the intricacies and the minor details that are important but which may otherwise be unrecognizable in the indigent language. According to Julian Robins and Jonathan Dewar, since indigenous languages contain encrypted specifics about indigenous case management methods, having a working language of these language systems allows one to more efficiently get access to and ability to transmit this healing knowledge to those in need of it (Robbins & Dewar, 2011). The knowledge of this traditional and indigent languages and the survival of these languages is thus a great contributor to the overall health of individuals and communities from a holistic point of view. Since peoples language is the mosaic in which all they know is recorded, it is folly to attempt to integrate indigenous traditional healing systems with modern case management methods without first building sufficient knowledge of the language in which the traditional healing was practiced. On the question of language and traditional healing systems, the researchers conclude that Language is a strong indicator of cultural continuity and general community health (Robbins & Dewar, 2011).

In the endeavor to practice traditional healing practices in a modern case management scenario, another factor that is as important to grasp as the language is the system of values and beliefs and customs that underlie the healing practice being carried out (Yeh, Hunter, Madan-Bahel, Chiang & Arora, 2004). Traditional healing is often based on a system of virtues and values like divine love, humility, compassion, community, oneness with nature and other such values CITATION Hil03 \l 1033 (Hill, 2003). To implement a traditional healing regimen in a modern context, the practitioner has to empathize with and envision the cultural and spiritual context in which the patient expects the practice to be carried out. Also, traditional medicine is holistic and caters to the health of an individual as a whole (Yeh, Hunter, Madan-Bahel, Chiang & Arora, 2004). Western scientific biomedicine is decidedly evidence-based and largely discredits or discounts the existence of a soul or spirit or its significance in medicine. It is worthy for a practitioner trained in Western Biomedicine to appreciate the importance of such concepts to indigenous traditional healing. While case management under modern scientific biomedicine is majorly involved with the identification and treatment of diseases, case management incorporating Indigenous traditional healing should be aimed at holistic restoration of an individual mentally, physically and spiritually.

Another intricacy to consider in attempting to assimilate traditional healing practices into modern case management is the relationships of the healing practices to the land, the language and the culture of the place in which it is natively practiced, sometimes as much as to make the healing practices ineffective when removed from this context. The natural environment of a particular culture influences the thought process of the inhabitants in numerous ways. This influence renders some of the Indigenous traditional healing methods voids when they are removed from the environment in which they have been localized. In particularly animistic cultures, traditional healing often accounts for the perceived connection between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, spirits and the landforms of a particular area. The practitioner should, therefore, be mindful of the context in the attempt to assimilate traditional healing practices into modern case management.

In traditional healing structures, all phenomenon, especially concerning the human body, is viewed from the perspective of interdependence. Interdependence infers that the body is viewed not as a single entity but as a complex entity of entities which depend on each other and which in turn depend on other external entities to exist. In traditional healing systems, healing is achieved by not only targeting the disease or the diseased part but by focusing on the whole individual and the environment in which he is supposed to recover. Likewise, in combining traditional healing systems with modern case management paradigms, the practitioner must strive to not only treat but to heal.

One must consider the theoretical framework underlying indigenous traditional healing systems to integrate the practices in a modern case management schema successfully. Despite the illusion of backwardness, traditional healing formulas and remedies are scientific. They were arrived at after the rigor of experimentation and observation and their continued use and persistence over time have led to a body of knowledge, whether formal or informal, that explain the various traditional case management methods. To integrate these practices into twenty-first-century health care, it is vital that the practitioner understands the theoretical premises to apply the knowledge in a manner that fully optimizes the quality of the healthcare provided. The practitioner must also understand how the patients or the indigenous community think of western scientific biomedicine and how it impacts on their culture. The practitioner must understand the role that the kinship system plays in the provision of medicine and the responsibility this bears for the practitioner. The practitioner must have knowledge of the various and distinct levels of kinship in the indigenous culture of practice. The practitioner must also be wary of the colonial relics on the social consciousness, psychology and religion to indigenous people.

In addition to caution with colonial relics, practitioners attempting to incorporate traditional healing practices into modern case management programmers must be wary of other such tendencies that relegate the indigenous culture to a position of inferiority to Western culture. Such tendencies include the overarching drive to assimilate under the guise of advancement. Though it is open to innovation, attempting to westernize traditional healing methods leaves the healing processes devoid of all the cultural, mental and spiritual pillars which make the methods work at their optimum levels. It is also worth to consider the responsiveness of the culture surrounding the indigene culture to the indigene culture. Cultural misunderstanding can cause harmless healing practices to be misconstrued for rituals and this may cause disharmony in the society and low responsiveness of the society to this alternative medicine.

The conflicting relationships between widely accepted theories and concepts in western biomedicine and indigenous traditional healing practices are also a factor to consider before integrating such traditional healing methods into a modern case management schema. It is only after understanding and appreciating the differences between these two approaches to healing that an attempt can be made in reconciling them to provide improved health care delivery for the greater good.

Though modern scientific biomedicine is highly advanced and has access and resources far more advanced than traditional healing practices, both represent an attempt by man to fight with disease, deformity and pathogens to improve the quality of life. Both are steps in the continuum of the advancement of human knowledge. The advancement of one does not, however, infer the out dating of another and both traditional healing practices and modern medicine have a place in modern health care delivery. The challenges to integrating traditional healing methods with modern medical care can be surmounted and the we...