Janice M. Bell, Author at International Family Nursing Association

Minnesota State University Mankato Doctor of Nursing Practice Graduates and Families Meet Glen and Becky Taylor

The School of Nursing at Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA, continues to prepare Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students. This DNP curriculum has a focus on family and societal health and several students dedicate their doctoral projects to family nursing practice. The Glen and Becky Taylor Family provided an endowment to support the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society in the School of Nursing and Becky Taylor Fellowships to support these DNP students.

In May 2019, The Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society hosted a graduation reception for the graduating DNP students. In attendance were Glen and Becky Taylor, students, families, and faculty mentors. Students spoke about their doctoral projects, program experiences, and goals for the future. During the gathering students were able to express to Glen and Becky Taylor the impact and meaning of the fellowship funds. Glen spoke to students about his and Becky’s decision to start an endowment to support the Institute.

Left to right:Kathryn Smith, Carrie Yvarow, Dr. Sue Ellen Bell, Dr. Sandra Eggenbeger, Becky and Glen Taylor, Brittany White, Angela Rickheim

The Institute supported this reception in order to acknowledge the accomplishments of these students, increase the visibility of doctoral education in the SON, and provide Glen and Becky Taylor with the opportunity to meet these students and their families. With the success of this event, we hope to continue this celebration annually.

Left to right: Angela Rickheim, Brittany White, Carrie Yvarow, and Kathryn Smith

The International Family Nursing Association is grateful for the very generous support received from the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society over many years.

Message from the IFNA President Dr. Sonja Meiers (USA): Make Family Nursing Visible Worldwide

MAKE FAMILY NURSING VISIBLE WORLDWIDE

I am honored and humbled by the opportunity to serve you as President of the International Family Nursing Association (2019 – 2021). I have such wonderful memories of connecting with many of you at the recent 14th International Family Nursing Conference (IFNC14) in Washington, DC. It feels so good to connect person-to-person at our conferences and affirm relationships developed in our virtual online environment as we make family nursing and family health stronger worldwide. Thank you to my IFNC14 Conference Co-Chair June Horowitz and to the Conference Planning Committee who dedicated their hearts and time to create an engaging conference. We learned well what family nurses can do to enhance family health through intentional consideration of social determinants.

I am thankful to Jane Lassetter Past President (2017 – 2019) for mentoring me during my last two years as Past President (2017 – 2019) during which I learned a great deal about who we are as IFNA. We are diverse, we “call in” from across many time zones, we have many talents and passions among us, we represent countries with varied health care systems, and our ranks of new members are growing in developing countries and among graduate students. It is indeed an exciting time of growth in membership and connections. Your IFNA Board of Directors is working diligently to lead a strategic planning process (2019 -2022) addressing our mission “to transform family health” with a “compassionate family focus, social justice, human dignity, and respect for all”. The Board is intentionally focusing on building IFNA’s financial sustainability to enact our strategic goals.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, I give thanks to you, as a member of IFNA every day. You are the heart and soul of IFNA and you are changing practice, education, research, and policy to make family lives better within the health experience worldwide. Thank you for your dedication, your kind words, your supportive ways, your creativity, and for sharing your professional gifts on behalf of families.

As we go forward, I welcome you to consider several themes and questions for the future of family nursing to MAKE FAMILY NURSING VISIBLE WORLDWIDE.

F = Family- and person-focused health, simultaneously. Can we, as family nurses, concurrently advance family caregiver health within the family health experience while simultaneously considering family health and individual health? How can we focus on the influences of mental health, immigration, violence, health information systems, climate change, and other emerging issues in new ways that support family health?

U = United in interprofessional and interdisciplinary collaborations. Can we realize a world where family nurses lead and join interdisciplinary and interprofessional teams to incorporate the talents of many to address family health challenges? How can we work more effectively and visibly as family nurses on interprofessional teams?

T = Technology, and its influence on family health and family nursing daily. Can we use technology to strengthen our family-nurse therapeutic relationships and intrafamily relationships? What will that look like? How can family nurses lead technology initiatives?

U = Universal health care access for all. Universal health care for all is the challenge set forth by the International Council of Nurses and the World Health Organization. How can IFNA advance the image of nurses and nursing worldwide so that every family has access to a nurse in every country?

R = Research-based family nursing is needed in health care environments focused on precision- and individualized-health care. Can we make certain that families and family influences are a natural part of conversations about precision-health care? What is precision family care based on evidence? How can you be part of the precision health movement of family science?

E = Environmentally-concerned family nursing is nursing that fundamentally considers the impact of climate change on family health. Natural disasters, political unrest, wars, and other sources of violence lead to involuntary migration and place many families at considerable risk daily. What can we do as family nurses within our countries to address climate health issues for families? How can we soften the suffering of migrating families?

We have had many successes together as IFNA members and we must celebrate them! The work of IFNA is built upon the legacies of many amazing leaders in family nursing. I believe that we have an obligation to continue this legacy work through growing our membership reach, growing our influence, growing our scholarship, and growing our leadership in family health and family nursing. I welcome you to join me in this adventure to MAKE FAMILY NURSING VISIBLE WORLDWIDE! Blessings to you in your daily work as family nurses!

Kind regards,

Sonja Meiers, PhD, RN

Winona State University, USA

Dr. Lawrence Ganong Studies Resilience Processes in Post-Divorce Families, Particularly Stepfamilies

Lawrence Ganong, PhD, is a Chancellor’s Professor of Human Development and Family Science and an Emeritus Professor of the Sinclair School of Nursing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. Larry is semi-retired but continues to write about and conduct research on resilience processes in post-divorce families, particularly stepfamilies. He and his wife and primary collaborator, Marilyn Coleman, have co-written or co-edited 10 books, and Ganong has co-authored nearly 300 refereed journal articles. Originally strictly a quantitative researcher, most of his scholarship over the past 30 years has been qualitative or mixed methods, although recently he has led some quantitative projects in which dyadic data were collected online from husbands and wives. Ganong has been interested in relationship development and maintenance across structural transitions in families, work he continues to do.

He also has long been interested in how nurses and health care professionals in general interact with structurally diverse families. He is a “founding” editorial board member of the Journal of Family Nursing, and he is pleased about how the journal has developed to become a strong voice for family nursing scholarship. He is an honorary member of Sigma Theta Tau and received an award in 2011 from the Journal of Family Nursing for his contributions to family nursing scholarship. In the spring of 2019, he received an honorary alumnus award from the Sinclair School of Nursing Alumni Association. For more information, contact IFNA member, Lawrence (Larry) Ganong.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LGanong

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrence-ganong-1235841a/

Dr. Karen Lyons Advances Knowledge About the Family Care Dyad in the Context of Chronic Illness

Karen S. Lyons, PhD, FGSA, is a Professor at the William F. Connell School of Nursing at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. She received her bachelor’s and masters in psychology from University College Dublin, Ireland, and her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from The Pennsylvania State University, where she specialized in gerontology and the family. Over her career, her program of research has focused on family experiences of chronic illness with particular attention to the family care dyad. Her innovative conceptual and methodological contributions to dyadic science and over two decades of family care research culminated in the Theory of Dyadic Illness Management (2018) – the first to propose chronic illness management as a dyadic phenomenon. The theory is currently being used across disciplines to study dyads in cancer, stroke, heart failure, dysphagia, dementia, and palliative care, to name a few. Her body of work has been cited in almost 100 review articles and textbooks and has led to numerous interdisciplinary and international collaborations and Fellowship in the Gerontological Society of America (2014). Her current work is focused on dyadic interventions to balance the needs of both members of the care dyad across the adult lifespan, including a current trial to examine the efficacy and feasibility of a dyadic intervention for couples living with heart failure.

Karen currently chairs the IFNA Dyadic Research Sub-Committee. She has purposely spent her entire career in schools of nursing, collaborating with, teaching, and mentoring nurses in family care.

For more information, contact IFNA member Karen Lyons.

Twitter: @KSLCareDyads

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-s-lyons-phd-fgsa-b0181a11/

Dr. Jeanne Murphy is a Practicing Midwife and Conducts Research with Child-Bearing Families

Jeanne Murphy, PhD, CNM, FACNM, is an Assistant Professor of nursing at the George Washington University School of Nursing. Prior to joining the university faculty, Dr. Murphy was a program officer in the Healthcare Delivery and Disparities Research Program at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) in Washington, DC. Dr. Murphy completed a post-doctoral fellowship on cancer prevention with the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland. During her work at the NIH, she designed and conducted research on the prevention of breast and cervical cancer among underserved populations.

Dr. Murphy’s current program of research seeks to improve understanding of breastfeeding in childbearing families and develop breastmilk predictive analytics to improve care of breastfeeding women. The goal of this work is to improve long-term breast health. Her cancer prevention research also examines approaches to embed cancer prevention interventions in maternal care practice and expands understanding of the mechanisms of cancer prevention through lactation. Dr. Murphy is a practicing midwife and she works at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center with childbearing families. View her LinkedIn profile here https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-murphy-0184698/ Or for more information, contact IFNA member, Dr. Murphy at [email protected]

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Thank you