IWU Viewing Family as A Crucial Component of Healthcare System Essay

Discuss from your nursing experience an intervention you used with a family using each of the 4 types of approaches:

1. Family as Context

• Focuses on the assessment and care of an individual patient in which the family is the context.
• Traditional
• Individual is in the foreground and the family is in the background
• Family serves as context for the individual as a resource or stressor (so the family can be either anegative or positive context).
  An example of this would be in the care of children under 18.  Physician rounds are generally “family centered” and done with the focus on the patient, but with discussion with both the patient and the parents or caregivers.

** For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, think of a time in your clinical practice or with your own particular family when one of the members of the family needed health care and other members of the family were involved in that person’s health care needs.  Explain who the family member in need of health care was, what was the condition of the family member, health problem, and health care needs.  What roles did each family member take in helping care for the individual family member?

2. Family as Client

• Assesses all family members
• The nurse is interested in the way all the family members are individually affected by the health/hospitalization of one member of the family unit.
• The family is in the foreground.
• Focus is on every member of the family.

An example of could be when a beloved matriarch of the family gets a grave diagnosis, the nurse would ask the patient how her family was dealing with the diagnosis?  How are the members of your family adjusting to this news?  Will the care you will need be a problem for your family?

**For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, think of a time in your clinical practice or with your own particular family when one family member suffered from a health care problem and as a result other members of the family developed health care needs.  Describe the health needs of all of the family members and the overall affects of the family members’ illness on the rest of the family.

3. Family as System

• The family as a whole is the patient.  The focus is on the individual and the family simultaneously.
• Interactions between family members become the target for nursing interventions.
• Emphasis is on the interactions between the family members.
• Runs on the theory that when something happens to one part of the system, the other parts of the system are affected as well (if one member of the family becomes ill, then the other members of the family are affected as well).
  For example, when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the nurse may ask the father, what has changed between you and your wife since the diagnosis?  How has this devastating diagnosis affected this child’s siblings?

**For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, describe how the family interacts with one another when one family member becomes ill.  Describe the types of interactions that occur such as one family member is in denial, one family member is crying and panicking, one family member becomes the caregiver, and so forth. Base your answer on your practice or your personal experience.

4. Family as Component of Society

• Looks at the family as a component of society.
• The family as a whole interacts with other institutions to receive, exchange, or give communication or services.
• This is a major aspect of Community Health nursing.
• Examples of this may include suggesting a support group for a patient/family for their disease, or asking how “society” (those outside of their family) have reacted to their diagnosis.

**For the Approaches to Family Nursing Assignment, describe how one family used a variety of community resources to help them care for a family member who has become ill or who has been diagnosed with a health care problem.  What resources did the family use or seek? What were the results?  How effective were the healthcare resources for the family and the ill family member?  What problems were encountered when the family tried to obtain community resources?