ABSTRACT
Background: When people in Northern Norway get ill, they often use traditional medicine. The global aim of this study was to examine the extended family networks’ function and responsibility in cases of illness in the family, in two Northern Norwegian communities with a population of mixed ethnicity.
Methods: Semi-structured individual interviews with 13 participants and 4 focus group interviews with total 11 participants were conducted. The text data was transcribed verbatim and analysed based on the criteria for content analysis.
Results: The participants grew up in areas where it was common to seek help from traditional healers. They were organized in networks and shared responsibility for the patient and they provided practical help and support for the family. According to the networks, health-care personnel should make room for the entire network to visit the patient in severe and life-threatening situations.
Conclusion: Traditional networks are an extra resource for people in these communities. The networks seem to be essential in handling and disseminating hope and manageability on an individual as well as a collective level. Health personnel working in communities with mixed ethnicity should have thorough knowledge of the mixed culture, including the importance of traditional network to the patients.
Acknowledgments
We want to express our gratitude to the participants who took part in this study. We are also grateful to Nina Foss who contributed substantially in the process of developing this project and to Jane Ekelund for technical support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.