“The days are long, but the years are short.” ~ Gretchen Rubin "The first issue of the Journal of Family Nursing (JFN), owned SAGE Publishing, was launched in February 1995. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of this journal dedicated to extending knowledge about family nursing and transforming practice with families. There is no other nursing…
Family Systems Care: Special Presentation to an audience of health care professionals interested in improving their knowledge and skills in working with families: Winterthur, Switzerland, May 2018 Lorraine Wright and I are very excited to offer our 4-day signature workshop, the Family Externship focused on Advanced Family Systems Care, Zurich University of Applied Sciences,…
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay Definition: "A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government" (Wickipedia). I am a registered nurse and a psychologist. My greatest desire is to move family nursing forward and change health care (assessment and intervention) to…
First International Family Nursing Conference Participants with Dr. Lorraine Wright and Dr. Maureen Leahey (1988) The First International Family Nursing Conference was hosted in May 1988 by the University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing and chaired by Dr. Lorraine M. Wright (450 participants from 15 countries attended this first conference). In 2015, the 12th International Family Nursing…
There is a growing conversation happening on Twitter within my family nursing community by #familynursing and #familyhealth scholars, practitioners, advocates, and organizations. Here is a list of of those who are currently active on Twitter (list updated (September 2019). I urge you to harness the power of Twitter to promote and advance #familynursing and #familyhealth. At the 12th International Family…
I'm currently doing some writing about the importance of family interventions in illness. I would like to offer some new integrative reviews and my favorite references (the oldies but goodies) that provide a convincing argument for family-level relational interventions that involve the whole family unit or part of the family unit experiencing illness (as opposed…
I've been thinking a lot about the struggle we have to make ideas "stick". In my work of creating and disseminating family nursing knowledge, I invite nurses to change their beliefs and behavior about families and "get" the benefits that exist for families and nurses when families are included in health care. Chip Heath and…
What is clinical scholarship, you ask? It is a form of knowledge creation that focuses on being immersed in clinical practice, observing practice, analyzing practice, and synthesizing what you have learned from practice (Bell, 2003; Diers, 1995). It is not formal research per se, but a distant cousin; recognized as a form of scholarship but…
Photo credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/398076054549131026/ There are a number of voices across several disciplines who are actively participating in the growing scholarly conversation about family focused health care in North America and beyond (Bell, 2017). In a Journal of Family Nursing Special Focus Issue on Social Media and Family Nursing, February 2017, Isaacson and Looman (2017) discuss…
Photos compliments of the International Family Nursing Association: https://internationalfamilynursing.org/2015/04/12/family-nursing-in-action-request-for-photos/ I was invited to offer a keynote at the British Columbia Quality and Safety Council's preconference forum on Patient and Family Centered Care. Yesterday's group wasn't my usual tribe of family nursing scholars and practitioners. Instead it was an interesting group of health care providers, legislators,…