ICD-10 Multiaxial presentation

Positive health: conceptual place, dimensions and implications

Positive health combines with pathology or illness to yield a broader concept of health, etymologically anchored on the concept of wholeness and enshrined in WHO's constitution. The most recognized aspects of positive health include functioning/resilience, resources/supports and quality of life. Systematic assessments of positive health are being incorporated into comprehensive diagnostic models that by attending to the totality of the person who consults may enhance effectiveness and ethics in diagnosis and care. Health, a precious human concern, constitutes a wide-ranging condition and experience. However, pathology, one of its important domains, has tended to monopolize attention when professionals discuss health and carry out health care. This short paper examines the concept of positive health, as opposed to ill-health, as well as some of its aspects or dimensions and its implications for comprehensive diagnosis and care.

Purposes and models of diagnostic systems

Emerging efforts at developing new international classification and diagnostic systems require a careful and fresh review and conceptualization of the meanings, purposes and models of diagnostic systems. Such meanings include both an informative statement as well as a process or activity. The purposes of diagnostic systems can be clustered under understanding of a case and planning effective clinical care and public health interventions. The models designed to give form to a diagnostic system must pay attention to the informational domains to be covered (from illness to positive health), the descriptive or measurement tools to be utilized (categories, dimensions, narratives), the evaluators to be engaged (clinicians, patient, family) and the structural schemas (single- or multilevel) required to accommodate meanings and purposes of interest.