Family nursing

Family Nursing Module 1 assignment
Overview

Discuss from your nursing experience an intervention you used with a family using each of the 4 types of approaches:

1. Family as Context

· Focuses on the assessment and care of an individual patient in which the family is the context.

· Traditional

· Individual is in the foreground and the family is in the background

· Family serves as context for the individual as a resource or stressor (so the family can be either anegative or positive context).
An example of this would be in the care of children under 18.  Physician rounds are generally “family centered” and done with the focus on the patient, but with discussion with both the patient and the parents or caregivers.

** For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, think of a time in your clinical practice or with your own particular family when one of the members of the family needed health care and other members of the family were involved in that person’s health care needs.  Explain who the family member in need of health care was, what was the condition of the family member, health problem, and health care needs.  What roles did each family member take in helping care for the individual family member?

2. Family as Client

· Assesses all family members

· The nurse is interested in the way all the family members are individually affected by the health/hospitalization of one member of the family unit.

· The family is in the foreground.

· Focus is on every member of the family.

An example of could be when a beloved matriarch of the family gets a grave diagnosis, the nurse would ask the patient how her family was dealing with the diagnosis?  How are the members of your family adjusting to this news?  Will the care you will need be a problem for your family?

**For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, think of a time in your clinical practice or with your own particular family when one family member suffered from a health care problem and as a result other members of the family developed health care needs.  Describe the health needs of all of the family members and the overall affects of the family members’ illness on the rest of the family.

3. Family as System

· The family as a whole is the patient.  The focus is on the individual and the family simultaneously.

· Interactions between family members become the target for nursing interventions.

· Emphasis is on the interactions between the family members.

· Runs on the theory that when something happens to one part of the system, the other parts of the system are affected as well (if one member of the family becomes ill, then the other members of the family are affected as well).
For example, when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the nurse may ask the father, what has changed between you and your wife since the diagnosis?  Ho