Introduction
Family nursing is a fairly new concept relative to the history of nursing practice. With any type of nursing process, assessment is the first (and ongoing) part of the process, followed by care planning and intervention. In delivering comprehensive care, the nurse must incorporate assessment of the family unit, or lack there-of, associated with the identified patient. Many family assessment tools have been devised to assist the nurse in gathering accurate data while opening up lines of communication and reflection for all members involved in the process. Selection of the appropriate tool for the identified family is crucial. Effective tools must be easy to administer in a fairly short amount of time and the data collected needs to be immediately available and useable. Family members need to see the relevance of the information gathered, and how it assists in improvement of their care- ideally soon after discussion, either by the nurse or a clinician.
An initial interview and follow up discussion with the K family was completed over the course of 3 sessions. The first encounter involved only the identified patient (IP). The second was the remainder of the family, and a third was with CK’s perceived family. After an initial assessment and evaluation of the K family a suggested direction of care emerged, but was re-evaluated after the second interview. This development was then paired with principles of Bowen’s theory, allowing for a clearer understanding as to the origin of some dysfunction and ineffective coping strategies. Through identification of stressors, discussion of coping mechanisms and implementation of the Friedman Family Assessment Model (FFAM) to organize the data, this author gained a clearer picture of family composition and structure of the K family, along with
