Dr. Marie Louise Luttik and her colleague, Dr. Wolter Paans, launched the first family nursing initiative in the Netherlands in 2014. The research group in Nursing Diagnostics and Family Care at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands, was granted 50.000 Euros by the Centre of Expertise Healthy Ageing. With this funding, efforts to build a collaborating network of care-, research- and educational institutions began which has now been named an Innovation Lab. The objective of this Innovation Lab is to develop and promote family nursing in the Netherlands.

A strong team focus on family nursing education and research is being developed. The educational team offered a 6-day training in Family Health Conversations (FamHC) to 40 nurses in the participating care institutions. Three PhD students are working on three different family nursing research programs: family involvement in the hospital setting; the FamHC as an evidence-based family nursing intervention; and the role of family nursing in supporting adolescents who are living with an chronically ill family member. For more information, contact IFNA member, Marie Louise Luttik.

Dr. Marie Louise Luttik and colleagues are organizing an interdisciplinary conference in the Netherlands, Feb 8 & 9, 2018: Family Health Over Lifespan. Call for papers opens May 15, 2017.

Catherine (Kit) Chesla, RN, PhD, FAAN, is a Professor and Shobe Endowed Chair for Ethics and Spirituality, Department of Family Health Care Nursing, University of California, San Francisco, USA. For over 20 years she has taught family theory, intervention, and research methods to doctoral and Family Nurse Practitioner students. She is engaged in multiple research projects that involve past, present and future work.  First, she and her colleague, Dr. Kevin Chun, are working on finishing up their analysis of interpretive phenomenological data regarding couple and family processes of care, support and conflict in living with type 2 diabetes (NIH R01 NR009111).  Intensive narrative study of foreign born and US born Chinese couples are being contrasted and described.  They believe that culturally-specific forms of couple relations apparent in Chinese couples have the possibility to broaden our ways of thinking about and delivering care to couples living with chronic illness  in the U.S.

In a separate project, that is just beginning, Dr. Chesla is working with a nephrologist, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, to learn about the concerns and considerations of elderly patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) and their families, regarding  treatment options (NIH R21 DK112100).  They aim to articulate the particular concerns and social context variables that patients and families bring to a decision to start dialysis or conservative/ palliative care management.  The aim of this interpretive project is to develop a decision tool to assist nephrologists in working with elderly patients with ESRD and their families in the future.

Finally, (and distinct from her family work) Dr. Chesla is starting pilot work on a lifestyle + sleep intervention program to prevent or delay type 2 diabetes in women with prediabetes or metabolic syndrome.  She is conducting this study with funding from the National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health at UCSF, and with co-investigators Dr. Kathryn Lee and Dr. Melinda Bender.

Dr. Chesla has a long been a strong advocate and champion for family nursing. She served as member of the Coordinating Committee that helped establish IFNA in 2009 and served as the President of IFNA from 2013-2015. She is currently a member of the IFNA Board of Directors. For more information, contact IFNA member Kit Chesla.

Website: https://nursing.ucsf.edu/faculty/catherine-chesla

On January 27, 2017, The National Academy of Medicine in the United States released a Discussion Paper, “Harnessing Evidence and Experience to Change Culture: A Guiding Framework for Patient and Family Engaged Care” which highlights, among other elements, the critical importance of developing skilled practice with families in order to change the culture of health care to attend to families’ physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.

This recommendation is supported by the findings of several family nursing transfer/translation research projects conducted in Canada by Dr. Fabie Duhamel and colleagues;  Denmark by Dr. Birte Ostergaard and colleagues;  Iceland by Dr. Erla Svavarsdottir and colleagues; Spain, Dr. Cristina Garcia-Vivar and colleagues; Switzerland (a), by Marianne Klaeusler and colleagues;  Switzerland (b), Barbara Preusse-Bleuler and colleagues, and Sweden by Eva Benzein and Britt-Inger Saveman and colleagues. Findings across these projects have shown that leadership support for family oriented care, change champions, and intensive education to implement family nursing knowledge and skills resulted in greater family satisfaction with the care received and increased work satisfaction reported by nurses.

For more information see: Bibliography: Knowledge Translation in Family Nursing

Dr. Britt-Inger Saveman (Sweden) at Umea University and Dr. Eva Benzein (Sweden) at Linnaeus University have shared an exciting and determined vision for implementing family nursing in Sweden since 2000 [Read more]. Beginning with a dedicated Family Focused Practice Unit that provided space and equipment to videotape nurse researchers’ conversations with families experiencing illness, they developed the Family Health Conversations (FamHC) intervention by culturally adapting existing Family Systems Nursing practice models. They coedited a textbook, co-authored numerous research publications with their colleagues about the use of Family Health Conversations across various populations of families, and developed an instrument: “Families Involvement in Nursing Care – Nurses’ Attitudes” (FINC-NA) that has been translated into more than ten languages and used in numerous research projects around the world.  They also initiated and hosted the First Nordic Conference in Family Focused Nursing in 2002 followed by 2006 and 2010; the Fourth Nordic Conference in Family Focused Nursing was held in 2014 in Odense, Denmark.

There are currently 7 IFNA members from Sweden.

For more information, contact IFNA member Eva Benzein.

This News Post was featured in the September 2016 issue of IFNA Global Connections.