Dr. Joanna Smith is a Lecturer in Children’s Nursing at the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. She emphasizes that she is, “first and foremost a children’s nurse” with 15 years of clinical experience, primarily caring for children and their families with complex needs requiring surgery, which informs her teaching and research,  Her main research interests relate to the way in which health professionals’ work with and involve children, young people and their families in decisions about their care, in the context of children with long-term conditions.  Although she is involved in a range of research methods, she primarily uses qualitative methods. She has successfully supervised several PhD students whose topics link to the focus of her research, for example, parent-child shared-decision making in asthma, and involving parents in their child’s pain care. Joanna is a member of the new UK/Ireland IFNA Chapter. For more information contact IFNA member, Joanna Smith.

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/josmith175 

Institutional website: https://medhealth.leeds.ac.uk/profile/1100/1504/joanna_smith

Tracey Redwood, PhD, PCRDS, PCHPE, RGN, RSCN, is a Senior Lecturer – Childrens Nursing, Department of Nursing, University of Northampton, United Kingdom. She has extensive clinical and academic experience in both Australia and the United Kingdom. She is  currently engaged in the Early Start in Early Years: Charnwood Evaluation with colleagues (Callaghan and Alexander). The Charnwood program is an outreach service for vulnerable first time parents with a focus on parental well-being to assist the family. It is delivered by health visitors, early childhood practitioners and family nursing support staff in Central England, United Kingdom. The programme is transformative in that it addresses family health issues by enabling support to centre on the lives of those children born at a disadvantage through education of their parents.

A mixed methodology has been employed. The qualitative component of the research involved recorded individual semi-structured telephone interviews, analysed thematically to reveal patterns of response in participants’ experience of the intervention and its impact. The quantitative component reviewed outcome measures analysed statistically, using SPSS to explore the impact of the Early Start Programme. Descriptive statistics will be used to describe service elements while demographic and descriptive information on age, ethnicity, referral source, number of sessions attended enabled a description of the service. This research with provide an understanding of the outcomes of the intervention for families. It will enable an exploration of the intervention at a service delivery level and an overview of the impact of the program.

Tracey Redwood is currently a member of the new UK and Ireland IFNA Chapter. For more information, contact IFNA member Tracey Redwood.

Anna Ólafía Sigurðardóttir, RN, PhD, is a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) at Landspitali – The National University Hospital in Iceland (LUH) and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Iceland and LUH. She served as the chairperson of the committee in charge of implementing Family Systems Nursing at all clinical units at LUH from 2007–2011 in collaboration with Dr. Erla Kolbrun Svavarsdottir and other members of the implementation team for the Landspitali University Hospital Family Nursing Implementation Project (2007–2011). She defended her doctoral thesis, “Family Systems Nursing Interventions in Pediatric Settings” in April 2016.

In her role as Chair of Pediatric Nursing at LUH, Dr. Sigurdardottir works with nurse managers, clinical nurse specialists (advanced practice nurses), and graduate nurses at the children’s division to  develop pediatric services with a focus on continuing education, family nursing, and research in pediatric settings. She has collaborated with Icelandic researchers in several intervention research projects which included families of children and adolescents with a variety of chronic illnesses/heath issues, and continuing nursing education and job satisfaction among the nurses and midwives in hospital settings and in community health. Master’s and doctoral students from both University of Iceland and University of Akureyri have also been involved in these research projects.  For more information, contact IFNA member Anna Olafia Sigurdardottir.  

Google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.is/citations?user=x3Wq4e0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Twitter: https://twitter.com/annaosig