Nurses have a commitment and an ethical and moral obligation to involve
families in health care. Theoretical, practical, and research evidence of the significance of the family to the health and well-being of individual members as well as the influence of the family on illness compel and obligate nurses to consider family-centered care an integral part of nursing practice. However, family-centered care is achieved responsibly and respectfully only by the enlistment of sound family assessment and intervention and relational practices. A rich tradition of nursing literature about the involvement of families in nursing care has been evolving, most specifically, over the past 30 years. Some
of the classic and more recent texts on family nursing have enabled a new language to emerge through naming, describing, and communicating about the
involvement of families in health care. Such terms as “family centered care” (Cunningham, 1978); “family focused care” (Janosik & Miller, 1979); “family interviewing” (Wright & Leahey, 1984, 1994, 2000); “family health promotion nursing” (Bomar, 2004); “family health care nursing” (Harmon Hanson, 2001; Harmon Hanson & Boyd, 1996); “family nursing” (Bell, Watson, & Wright, 1990; Friedman, Bowden, & Jones, 2003; Friedman, 1998; Gilliss,
1991; Gilliss, Highley, Roberts, & Martinson, 1989; McFarlane, 1986;
Wright & Leahey, 1987a, 1987b; Wegner & Alexander, 1993; Leahey &
Wright, 1987; Wright & Leahey, 1990; Broome, Knafl, Pridham, &
Feetham, 1998); “family systems nursing” (Wright & Leahey, 1990; Wright,
Watson, & Bell, 1990); “nursing of families” (Feetham, Meister, Bell, &
Gilliss, 1993); and “family nursing as relational inquiry” (Doane & Varcoe, 2005) have all helped to bring forth the awareness and emergence of a vital aspect of nursing practice heretofore overlooked, neglected, or minimized. Perhaps the most significant, but not necessarily well known, publication about family nursing produced in the past 5 years is the monograph published
by the International Council of Nurses entitled The Family Nurse: Frameworks for Practice developed by Madrean Schober and Fadwa Affara (2001). It is a convincing validation for an emerging new role and specialty to have the influential International Council of Nurses identify the “family nurse” and “family nursing” as one of the important new trends in nursing.