Marion Mitchell, PhD, Grad Cert (Higher Educ), RN, is an Associate Professor of Critical Care at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Menzies Health Institute Queensland at Griffith University and Princess Alexandra Hospital, Australia and Honorary Fellow, School of Health in Social Science – The University of Edinburgh. The philosophy that underpins her research is that patient care equally involves the care of families who are intrinsic to the well-being of patients. She has been conducting clinical research in the area of caring for families within the highly technical environment of Intensive Care Units (ICU) for over 15 years. She led the development of a Position Statement on Partnering with Families in Critical Care for the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses (ACCCN) in 2015. Dr. Mitchell is a previous President, Vice-President, and Treasurer of ACCCN and is their representative on the World Federation of Critical Care Nurses. For more information contact IFNA member, Marion Mitchell.
Family Nursing in Sweden: A Tribute to Visionary Leadership
Dr. Britt-Inger Saveman, Umea University, Sweden and Dr. Eva Benzein, Linnaeus University, Sweden have shared an exciting and determined vision for implementing family nursing in Sweden since 2000. Beginning with a dedicated family focused practice unit that provided space and equipment to videotape nurse researchers’ conversations with families experiencing illness, they, along with their colleagues, 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 FamHC 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. For more information contact IFNA members, Britt-Inger Saveman and Eva Benzein.
Dr. Eva Benzein was the recipient of the 2015 IFNA Excellence in Family Nursing Award.
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Dr. Melanie Lutenbacher Advances Knowledge in Maternal Child Health
Melanie Lutenbacher, PhD, RN, FAAN, is an Associate Professor of Nursing and an Associate Professor of Medicine (Pediatrics) at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. As a maternal child health researcher, she has focused her efforts on improving birth, parenting and child health outcomes in families experiencing health disparities, those at risk for abuse and neglect, and/or families with children who have special health needs. She and her team have developed and tested programmatic interventions composed of behavioral, educational, and clinical strategies and delivered in community and home-based settings. She is currently using a randomized clinical trial to examine the efficacy of the Maternal Infant Health Outreach Worker (MIHOW) home visitation program to improve health outcomes in a sample of pregnant Hispanic women and their children. She and her team are examining birth outcomes, breastfeeding rates, infant feeding practices, maternal stress and depressive symptoms, and parenting styles. . Preliminary results indicate that women assigned to the MIHOW program had lower levels of depressive symptoms and parenting stress, and higher levels of breastfeeding self-efficacy than women in the control group.
Dr. Lutenbacher is currently a member of the IFNA Research Committee. For more information contact IFNA member, Melanie Lutenbacher.
Dr. Cynthia Steinwedel Promotes Family Nursing in Medical Surgical Care
Dr. Cynthia Steinwedel is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, USA. She is a medical-surgical nurse and has devoted her efforts in family nursing to incorporating family aspects of nursing care into all topics in medical surgical nursing. Her area of research is in family caregiving for chronically ill family members. She has served on the IFNA Education Committee as a member, chairperson, and currently as webinar chairperson. She will be incorporating a family focus into simulation for undergrad nursing students at Bradley University. For more information contact IFNA member, Cynthia Steinwedel.
Marianne Kläusler-Troxler Leads A Family Nursing Action Research Project at University Hospital Zurich
Marianne Kläusler-Troxler, MScN, ANP, and her colleagues at the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland are leading a family nursing knowledge to action research project in which the Calgary Family Assessment and Intervention Models (Wright & Leahey, 2013) are being integrated into practice in mother-child care (obstetrics, gynecology, neonatology). Before- and after-implementation is being examined through an action research process that includes: design of the study, data gathering, data analysis, communicating outcomes, taking action. A multidisciplinary team providing care on the mother-child unit is involved the implementation project and a pilot study on one of the units is being planned to evaluate the implementation process. For more information contact IFNA member, Marianne Kläusler-Troxler.
