Introduction

This chapter deals with the nature of healthcare itself – one of the largest, oldest and most important of the information domains – and of its associated disciplines and professions. The analysis is necessary in order to set the context for later discussion of information users, resources, etc., and involves several domain analysis approaches, particularly:

Each of these has a historical perspective, which will be considered in Chapter 2.

Because a discipline is defined in large measure by its knowledge base, generally expressed as information in documents, this chapter focuses on the ‘creation’ stage of the information chain. The topics discussed here have extensive literatures in themselves, so this treatment will be tightly focused and very selective in its quotation of references and resources, which will usually be used simply as examples.

Nature of the discipline

In order to understand the healthcare domain in information terms, it is necessary first to understand something of the disciplines and professions within it. Before that, the idea of ‘healthcare’, and indeed of ‘health’ itself, must be clarified.

Health and healthcare

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health is ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. This definition was established in the WHO constitution, written in 1946, and has not been modified since (World Health Organization, 1946).

This ambitious definition is a broad one, unusually so for the time when it was originated, insisting that health includes social, as well as mental and physical well-being, and also in promoting a positive ‘well-being’ view of health. This is in contrast to a more negative viewpoint, which has influenced much medical practice: that health is simply the absence of disease (a diagnosed biological malfunction) or illness (the personal experience of the consequences of disease). These two views of health persist side by side (Baggott, 2004).