Abstract:
The objectives of this research are 1) to study villages potential and alternative in community health care, 2) to study villages learning, adapting and decision making in health care, 3) to experiment a health care development with people participation method, 4) to analyze conditional factors affecting the work of health care development with people participation. Results of the study show that villagers possess various potentials and alternatives in health care at the individual / family / community levels. When face with minor health problems, they take care each other within the familys if that can not cure, they are ready to seek services from the communitys health experts or nearby state health center. The villagers can apply traditional folk wisdom and modem knowledge for health care smoothly without rejecting one of them. Taking the system as a whole, it was found that villagers have many alternatives in health care, i.e., the system of health care in the family and community, the system of local folk medicine, the systems of Thai and modern medicines in state health service centers and other medical alternatives. However, factors relating to various and appropriate alternatives for community health care are the ability for active learning, ability for continuing adjustment and self-reliance thinking under the changing social and cultural context. The health care development with people participation under the native health care knowledge to promote self-health care has to be in accordance with the community learning process in health care under major conditional factors, i.e., local knowledgeable persons, native categories or knowledge, community family and kinship, level of knowledge acceptance, socio-economic security, biological diversity and level of success of state health care service.
Chulalongkorn University. Office of Academic Resources