“By working together and caring for one another we can win this fight”: A qualitative exploration of a traditional healer's perspectives of care of people with epilepsy in a South African urban township in Cape Town

Abstract

There is a gap in knowledge about the construction of care in the Global South where biomedical care remains largely inaccessible to many people, resulting in people seeking health care from the indigenous sector of health care. As part of a larger study, in this, article we present findings from a single individual interview with an indigenous healer using a semi-structured interview guide that was based on Kleinman's Explanatory Model Framework. Key themes that emerged from the thematic analysis of our indigenous healer's audio-recorded transcribed transcript were about “care”. The four overarching subthemes were the following: (i) care in the family, (ii) care in the community, (iii) care in the health system, and (iv) respondents' construction of care. A key feature of care, for this healer, is its explicit location in lineages of community — care is seen not as an individual or organizational issue, but part of the shared social fabric. We argue that it is crucial to attend to the lay understandings and practices of care which reflect diverse ways of understanding care and relationality in context. Future research is needed to close this gap.