The Study On Family And Social Burden Of Eight Kinds Of Diseases

Background Facing up with the increasing menace of chronic diseases and emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, how to allocate the limited health resources is always a common serious problem to WHO and each nation. Lacking of suitable comprehensive evaluation on the burdens of different diseases is one of the main reasons that carry out this dilemma. It is a core issue of health policy-decision that how to determinate the priority of developing and solving issues in the areas of health, which is mainly based on the knowledge on the burden of different diseases. So it is evident that the evaluation on disease burden should influence the rationality of health policy-decision. At present, among the methods of evaluating the burden of diseases from World Bank and WHO, which evaluates the effect of death and disability from diseases and uses DALY as an index to measure and compare the burden of different diseases, is the most advanced and comprehensive. The main conceptual frame of DALY, pointed by Dr. Murray CJL the founder of DALY, is that the disease burden is the function loss of patients. However, the disease burden includes not only the death and disability of patients but also the impact on the patients' family and the society. This study was planned to explore the model to comprehensively evaluate the disease burden on the patients, patients' family, and society, which would be benefit to scientifically evaluate the comprehensive burden of diseases and provide helpful basis to health policy-decision. Methods [ part â…  ] Based on the General System Theory and the principles of family medicine, the biological-psychological-social characters of diseases and their effects on disease burden were analyzed. [Part â…¡] First, a qualitative study was carried out to investigate the kinds of disease burden on patients' family. Second, a questionnaire on the disease burden was developed using the results of the qualitative study. Three choices, that is, 0 (no influence), 1 (a litter bit influence) and 2 (serious...