The Tri-Optic II: Embracing the family voice.

Abstract

In June, 2015, for the issue marking the passing of Donald Bloch, the intellectual founder of the collaborative health care movement, we wrote an editorial called, "The Tri-Optic: Next step for Collaborative Family Healthcare" (Mauksch & Fogarty, 2015). Bloch had famously proposed the "dual optic": the partnership of Dr. Biomedicine and Dr. Psychosocial (Bloch, 1988). Our readers, including many Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) members, understand the value of a family perspective and are grappling with the next steps to truly integrate family and systems thinking into all levels of health care. A current exploration about the last 10 years of articles published in the journal by Tai Mendenhall, a member or our editorial board (personal communication, 2015), has found that the most common topic of focus is family health and functioning in 28% of the articles. This focus was also evident to varying degrees in all the plenaries at the 2015 CFHA conference held in Portland, Oregon. we pose the following questions to the FSH readership and CFHA community: Where are we, individually and collectively, with our knowledge about families as resources in and influences on health care? How are we teaching our learners about family-oriented care? How do we integrate family thinking into our various models of care? How do models of behavioral health integration include the family context in patient care?