Towards a Common Understanding of the Health Sciences.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of health sciences is to maintain and improve the health of individuals and populations and to limit disability. Health research has expanded astoundingly over the last century and a variety of scientific disciplines rooted in very different scientific and intellectual traditions has contributed to these goals. To allow health scientists to fully contextualize their work and engage in interdisciplinary research, a common understanding of the health sciences is needed. The aim of this paper is to respond to the call of the 1986 Ottawa Charter to improve health care by looking both within and beyond health and health care, and to use the opportunity offered by WHO's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) for a universal operationalization of health, in order to develop a common understanding and conceptualization of the field of health sciences that account for its richness and vitality.

METHODS: A critical analysis of health sciences based on WHO's ICF, on WHO's definition of health systems and on the content and methodological approaches promoted by the biological, clinical and socio-humanistic traditions engaged in health research.

RESULTS: The field of health sciences is presented according to: 1) a specification of the content of the field in terms of people's health needs and the societal response to them, 2) a meta-level framework to exhaustively represent the range of mutually recognizable scientific disciplines engaged in health research and 3) a heuristic framework for the specification of a set of shared methodological approaches relevant across the range of these disciplines.

CONCLUSION: This conceptualization of health sciences is offered to contextualize the work of health researchers, thereby fostering interdisciplinarity.