Medical Family Therapy (COU572)

The medical family therapy course introduces students to work collaboratively with medical and mental health professionals within a medical setting. It uses a common systemic language to address psychosocial problems of individuals, couples and families with acute and chronic medical related concerns from a systemic family therapy perspective. The course will also assess the role of the medical family therapist as he/she navigates relational conflicts that can arise in couples and families dealing with childhood developmental problems and medical related issues.

• An Overview of Medical Family Therapy
• Clinical Strategies for Medical Family Therapy
• Collaboration with other Health Professionals
• The Shared Emotional Themes of Illness
• The Self of the Medical Family Therapist
• Community Engagement
• Health Behaviours that Harm
• Couples and Illnesses
• Pregnancy Loss, Infertility and Reproductive Technology
• Medical Family Therapy with Children
• Somatising Patients and their Families
• The Experience of Genomic Medicine: The New Frontier
• Care-giving, End of Life Care, and Loss

• Critique theoretical and conceptual framework underlying medical family therapy.
• Appraise the key ideas/ concepts including common systemic language in working collaboratively with medical and mental health professionals within a medical setting.
• Organise salient ideas and concepts with that of the person-of-the-therapist in a given clinical context.
• Assemble the collaborative skills needed to work with medical and mental health professionals within a medical setting from the medical family therapy perspective.
• Prepare one’s teaching ability to present systemic family therapy concepts and ideas to other health professionals within the medical setting.
• Formulate the medical family therapy concepts and technique(s) for application in one’s collaborative work with medical/ mental health professionals.