African Chapter
Chair: Petra Brysiewicz
[email protected]
Terms of Reference (2024 – 2025) 2-years
Purpose:
To introduce, promote, enhance, and sustain family focused nursing throughout Africa by:
- Providing opportunities for facilitating professional networking amongst family-focused nurses
- Demonstrating leadership in identifying and addressing the educational needs of nurses in relation to the provision of family focused care
- Facilitating and promoting family focused research
- Maintaining a strong connection with the International Family Nursing Association
Chapter strategic plan
The vision of the IFNA African Chapter is to promote family focused nursing practice, education and research in Africa. This will be achieved through creating a platform for the sharing ideas, discussion and collaboration for Family Nursing in Africa.
Family focused nursing practice
- Develop a standard presentation (for consistency) to lobby for family focused nursing in Africa. This includes an advocacy toolkit.
- Request for a presentation slot at each member country’s key nursing forums e.g. Forum of University Nursing Deans of South Africa (FUNDISA), the Academy of Nursing of South Africa, Institute of Nursing Research, Nigeria and via nursing education institutions in higher education institutions throughout Africa.
- Provide free webinar series for nurses and other allied health professionals in Africa on family focused nursing.
Education
- Develop a training package to empower nurse educators with information on the value of family focused nursing into the curriculum
- Advocate for the introduction of family focused nursing curricular that address the relevant practice, education and research, thus preparing the undergraduate nurse with the necessary knowledge and skills of family focused nursing. This is via presentations at country level key nursing forums
Research
- Develop a virtual community of practice for nurses in Africa (clinicians, educators and researchers) on family focused nursing
- Conduct a scoping review of family focused nursing research in Africa
- Facilitating an IFNA symposiums for African family focused nursing research every two years.
- Publications in African Nursing journals (peer reviewed and professional journals) to create awareness about family-focused nursing for Africa e.g. Nursing Update, Africa Journal of Nursing & Midwifery, International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences
Internationalization
- Develop an African IFNA chapter webpage
- Establish a quarterly newsletter to share relevant and valuable family focused nursing information in Africa and beyond.
- Develop a social media strategy to make use of virtual platforms such as twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp groups to communicate family-focused nursing in Africa
Geographic Regions
The IFNA chapter includes the whole of Africa as a continent (54 African countries) including the surrounding Islands (Seychelles, Madagascar, Comoros and Mauritius). Within the African context, all types of healthcare and nursing school settings will be considered.
It is understood by the Chapter that this is a vast geographical area to include as a Chapter; however, due to the under development of family focused nursing in this region we are proposing that this is how we start. We are hopeful that in time to come we could then divide Africa into different Chapters as required.
