Dear Fabie: I am thinking about you today with love and admiration as your colleagues gather in Montreal to celebrate and honor your distinguished academic career at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Montreal, Canada.
I am so proud of your efforts to make family nursing a priority in your work and the amazing good that has come from your deep domain knowledge about family nursing practice which you have generously shared with both English- and French-speaking family nursing communities around the world.
I am grateful for your energy and commitment to family nursing that began when you had the privilege of being a member of the first Master of Nursing class at the University of Calgary and witnessed, firsthand, the beginning evolution of advanced Family Systems Nursing theory and practice through the mentoring of Dr. Lorraine Wright and Dr. Wendy Watson Nelson. Talk about the synchrony of life and how you found yourself at the University of Calgary at that auspicious time when Lorraine Wright had just been recruited to the University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing in 1980 to help begin the first Master of Nursing program! I loved your story of being in the first Family Systems Nursing specialization cohort of graduate nursing students who followed Lorraine around through the hospital doing family nursing like ‘little chicks being led by their mother hen!’
You had a chance to be among the first graduate student cohort at the opening of the Family Nursing Unit at the University of Calgary–a particular kind of practice with families experiencing illness that seemed to have been such a fit with your structure–that you soon completed a doctoral program and collected your dissertation research data at the Family Nursing Unit.
You’ve had a number of SIGNIFICANT FIRSTS in your distinguished career: you established the first Family Nursing Unit for research and education at the University of Montreal in 1993 (the Denise Latourelle Family Nursing Unit) where you conducted therapeutic conversations with hundreds of families experiencing illness and supervised graduate students’ advanced nursing practice with families; you co-chaired the 3rd International Family Nursing Conference held in Montreal in 1994; you co-established the first-ever Center of Excellence in Family Nursing at the University of Montreal in 2010, which focuses on examining the transferability and sustainability of family nursing theory to practice settings; and in 2012, you received Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funding to establish a first International Research Collaboration in Family Systems Nursing Knowledge Translation. Along the way, you’ve published and presented your work and wrote 3 editions of a family nursing textbook in the French language: La santé et la famille: Une approche systémique en soins infirmiers [Families and health: A systemic approach in nursing care]. Your outstanding contributions to family nursing were honoured with a 2017 Distinguished Contribution to Family Nursing Award from the International Family Nursing Association.
Throughout the many ways you have led knowledge development in family focused care in Montreal and beyond at both nursing and interprofessional levels, you have been the first leader in family nursing to prioritize knowledge transfer/knowledge translation in your research and publications. I consider you to be one of the foremost thinkers in the world about knowledge translation of family nursing theory to practice settings. None of this would have been possible to accomplish without your deep commitment and skilled knowledge about advanced Family Systems Nursing practice with families.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your devotion to these important ideas of family nursing and for the quiet, selfless ways your hard work and commitment has grown and expanded this new wave of scholarship you are now leading about transferability and sustainability of family nursing to practice. Your life and your career is necessarily a circular process of each informing the other—and we have all benefited from your gifts of generous friendship and generous knowledge development in family nursing. And now we look forward to your time of “preferment” ahead and hope you will continue to advance our ideas and methodologies about how best to translate family nursing theory to practice settings around the world.
With heartfelt thanks, JMB
I’ve developed a Twitter Moment in honor of your special day of celebration.
Selected Bibliography of Dr. Fabie Duhamel’s Publications in Family Nursing:
Bareil, C., Duhamel, F., Lalonde, L., Goudreau, J., Hudon, E., Lussier, M. T… Lalonde, G. (2015). Facilitating the implementation of interprofessional collaborative practices into primary care: A Trilogy of Driving Forces. Journal of Health Care Management, 60(4), 287-301.
Duhamel, F. (1994). A family systems approach: Three families with a hypertensive member. Family Systems Medicine, 12(4), 391-404. doi: 10.1037/h0089166
Duhamel, F. (1995). The practice of family nursing care: Still a challenge! Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 27(1), 7-11.
Duhamel, F. (2010). Implementing family nursing: How do we translate knowledge into clinical practice? Part II: The evolution of 20 Years of teaching, research, and practice to a Center of Excellence in Family Nursing. Journal of Family Nursing, 16(1), 8-25. doi: 10.1177/1074840709360208
Duhamel, F. (Ed.). (2015). La santé et la famille: Une approche systémique en soins infirmiers [Families and health: A systemic approach in nursing care] (3rd ed.) Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Gaëtan Morin editeur, Chenelière Éducation. [In French]
Duhamel, F. (2017). Translating knowledge from a Family Systems Approach to clinical practice: Insights from knowledge translation research experiences. Journal of Family Nursing, 23, 461-487. https://doi.org/10.1177/1074840717739030
Duhamel, F., & Campagna, L. (1997). La famille: est-elle si importante en soins cardiovascularies? [Is the family important in cardiovascular care?]. Canadian Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 8(4), 16-22. [in French].
Duhamel, F., & Dupuis, F. (2003). Families in palliative care: Exploring family and health –care professionals’ beliefs. International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 9(3), 113-119. PMID: 12682573
Duhamel, F., & Dupuis, F. (2004). Guaranteed returns: Investing in conversations with families of cancer patients. Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, 8(1), 68-71. doi: 10.1188/04.CJON.68-71
Duhamel, F., & Dupuis, F. (2011). Towards a Trilogy Model of Family Systems Nursing Knowledge Utilization: Fostering circularity between practice, education and research. In E.K., Svavarsdottir & H. Jonsdottir (Eds.), Family nursing in action (pp. 53-68). Reykjavik, Iceland: University of Iceland Press.
Duhamel, F., Dupuis, F., & Girard, F. (2010). Launching a Center of Excellence in Family Nursing, University of Montreal. Journal of Family Nursing, 16(1), 124-125. doi:10.1177/1074840709359931
Duhamel, F., Dupuis, F., Reidy, M., & Nadon, N. (2007). A qualitative evaluation of a family nursing intervention. Clinical Nurse Specialist, 21(1), 43-49.
Duhamel, F., Dupuis, F., Turcotte, A., Martinez, A.-M., & Goudreau, J. (2015). Integrating the Illness Beliefs Model in clinical practice: A Family Systems Nursing Knowledge Utilization Model. Journal of Family Nursing, 21(2), 322-348. doi:10.1177/1074840715579404
Duhamel, F., & Talbot, L. (2004). A constructivist evaluation of Family Systems Nursing interventions with families experiencing cardiovascular and cerebrovascular illnesses. Journal of Family Nursing, 10(1), 12-32. doi: 10.1177/1074840703260906
Dupuis, F., Duhamel, F., Michaud, C., & Turcotte, A. (2011). Development of a Knowledge Appropriation Model in a Family Systems Approach for Nurses who work with patients with chronic illness and their families. Research project funded by the Quebec Network on Nursing Intervention Research
Goudreau, J., & Duhamel, F. (2003). Interventions in perinatal family care: A participatory study. Families, Systems, & Health, 21(2), 165-180.
Goudreau, J., Duhamel, F., & Ricard, N. (2006). The impact of a Family Systems Nursing educational program on the practice of psychiatric nurses. A pilot study. Journal of Family Nursing, 12(3), 292-306.
Lalonde, L., Goudreau, J., Hudon, E., Lussier, M. T., Bareil, C., Duhamel, F.,… and the Group for TRANSIT to Best Practices in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in Primary Care (2014). Development of an interprofessional program for cardiovascular prevention in primary care: A participatory research approach. SAGE Open Medicine, 2, 2050312114522788. doi:10.1177/2050312114522788
Lang, A., Fleiszer, A. R., Duhamel, F., Aston, M., Carr, T., & Goodwin, S. (2015). Evidence-informed primary bereavement care: A study protocol of a knowledge-to-action approach for system change. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 14, 121-145. doi:10.1177/160940691501400102
Lessard, S., Bareil, C., Lalonde, L., Duhamel, F., Hudon, E., Goudreau, J., Lévesque, L. (2016). External facilitators and interprofessional facilitation teams: A qualitative study of their roles in supporting practice change. Implementation Science, 11(97), 1-12. doi: 10.1186/s13012-016-0458-7