Li-Chi Chiang, RN, PhD, is a Professor, School of Nursing, National Defense Medical Center, Taiwan.  Her current research is focused on a family nursing knowledge transfer project in which critical nurses learn to offer family nursing interventions to families of patients in ICU.  (A photo of an ICU nurse in Taiwan offering family nursing intervention to a family is shown below.)  Dr. Chiang currently serves as a member of the IFNA Practice Committee and as an IFNA country liaison. For more information contact Li-Chi Chiang: [email protected]

Christen Erlingsson, Med. Dr., District Nurse Specialist, RN, is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health and Life Science, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her current focus in family nursing research is in conceptualizing how people understand ”family”. She recently collaborated with Dr. Petra Bryziewicz at University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa in a study that compared undergraduate and postgraduate nursing students’ personal definitions of family. Additional collaboration with UKZN includes supervison of doctoral students’ thesis projects based on family nursing based care interventions in Critical Care. Dr. Erlingsson’s research has also included studies on closing letters to family who have participated in Family Health Conversations (Fam-HC), and studies on older family caregivers’ health. Recently she has collaborated with researchers at Umeå University in Sweden testing psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the Iceland-Family Perceived Support Questionnaire (ICE-FPSQ). For more information contact IFNA member, Christen Erlingsson.

Maureen Leahey, RN, PhD, has been appointed to the newly created Patient, Family, and Public Advisory Council for the Nova Scotia Health Authority in Canada. This provincial council advises senior leaders, healthcare providers, staff, and physicians on policies, practices, planning and delivery of patient and family centered care. The initial focus of this 12 member volunteer Council will be to offer input on health services planning.

This is an exciting step for the Nova Scotia Health Authority to ensure patients, families, and communities are meaningful partners of the organization and that their perspectives are heard and reflected in decision making. Dr. Leahey is the co-author of the Calgary Family Assessment and Intervention Models and her seasoned wisdom about how to be helpful to families will help make family nursing more visible at the provincial level of government in Canada.  For more information contact IFNA member, Maureen Leahey.