Social history - my working definition
A collection of information about lifestyle, culture, behaviour of an
individual which assists the doctor with assessment of disease risk for this
individual and the effect of disease on this individual.
Some is collected for legal and administrative needs and this varies in each
country.



Ethnicity
Immigrant status - year
- - ? interned
- - country of birth
- - reasons for move (economic, religious, family, war)
Housing (house, flat, caravan, shack, tent, natural shelter, group
accommodation)
Family type in dwelling (Nuclear family, 3 generation family, multiple adults)
Education ( primary, secondary, tertiary) total years of schooling if less than 10
Language used at home
Jobs - past and present
Actual place of work
If ever in prison
Drug use
method of administration (intravenous, smoking, oral, sniffed)
substances used (tobacco, alcohol, THC, amphetamines, ecstacy, kava and other!)
Retired /Jobseeking/ Not in regular Workforce/ Subsistence existence/ Not cash economy/ work from home/ social security benefit recipient
Leisure activities
Sporting activities (past and present)
Marital status/ Sexuality
and a link to spouse´s name, type of work, ethnicity
Dependents
Diet
Religion
War Service (conflict, type of service eg navy, guerilla)
Political affiliation
Does another individual deal with this person's financial affairs (legal or
informal arrangement)
Does another individual deal with this person's medical decisions? (legal or informal arrangement)
This person's goals for their own life - usually recorded along the way in
progress notes. eg studying medicine,

How to order and present all this info?
Multiple choices, some sort of drop down box, a database of useful suggestions
but a free text option also. Will this free text get into the database as an
entry?
Some has to be marked confidential (at various levels, I do recall)

We need basic categories on a front tab
Define basic according to what is most useful according to what we do with
this information (eg assessing disease risk) and what we have to collect for
our jurisdiction
Less needed options on other tabs
-any system needs to both display the current subset of social history but
keep accessible/display past values of the same items.
-items must be sql searchable, e.g we will need to be able to find all the
single mothers with one previous pregnancy with a large baby without social
support etc.
Possible uses for yet more databases are ethnic effects on health (eg
australian aboriginal in urban society has a large risk of central obesity
with hypertension, diabetes and early death)
I think that disease risk should be able to be listed from a disease database
(eg lived in Papua New Guinea, has malaria risk; outdoor worker with pale
skin, risk of skin cancer) I don't mean to pre define these risks, i want a
way of having these properly filed after I think of them in a consultation