The Process of Nursing Partnership in Family Health

Abstract

The study was an exploration of the nature of nursing practice with families with young children in complex circumstances. The purpose was to further explicate the health patterning process of nursing partnership through praxis research. The theory of health as expanding consciousness was a priori, where consciousness refers to the informational capacity of the partnership between participants. Expressing a unitary transformative paradigm, a hermeneutic dialectic methodology was used.

The form of research took the form of practice and the researcher was as if practitioner. Five families were visited in their homes between five and eight times. The dialogue evolved as a natural conversation with increasing rapport initiated by an invitation to participants to talk about health and their family. A summary text incorporating family quotes and researcher synthesis was integral to the dialogue. Pattern recognition by participants expressed the process of health as expanding consciousness within the research endeavor. Analysis of the partnership drew on theory of narrative and language.

The evolving dialogue of the partnership expressed the movement through the increasing complexity of health-in-relation-to-family as the family members recounted their experience, to a concise statement of insight into family health as the potential for action. The families showed a new comprehension of their current circumstances, moving beyond a time of strife in family life to expanded vision of a future with purpose and a sense of community in inter-dependence. Disease was a meaningful and integrative feature of family life. Action concerned new ways of living as family in the present with support from services.

A process for modelling family health as praxis was described. Health as dialectic emerged as a significant theme in its inter-relationship with themes of pattern recognition, dialogue and partnership. This explication of the nature of praxis with families was presented as evolving personal theory with health and caring synonymous in process: the practice wisdom of nursing expressing health as expanding consciousness.