Collective health and family medicine

In Mexico, the arrangement of clinical practice has been influenced by a decision-making process that seeks to improve health indicators, thus transforming the patient into a number. Family medicine has been practiced within the limits of an institutional biomedical model where the health-disease process is approached from a biologist perspective. On the other hand, collective health understands this process as stemming from the collective sphere and includes social and biological perspectives, giving an important standing to society. Likewise, it puts policy as a determinant in bettering social health bringing together public policy with health matters. Family medicine must become the axis around which health needs are catered to, together with social conditioning factors that affect families and individuals. This leads to a trans-disciplinary approach to communities set free from a mere biomedical profile. In this context, collective health provides theoretical support to the upcoming debate on family medicine.