Family Values Paper
Paul Wright RN BSN
Dynamic of Family Systems
Lori Cranwell
There a many ways in which families are an integral part of the health and well being of its members. There are also different sizes of families and subsystems of families. How the family deals with illness depends on their cultural values as well as how they were brought up. The definition of a family depends on its size, and their interaction with each other. There are single parent families, same sex parent families, and extended families to include two or more generations in the same house. The definition of family can also be influenced by what part of the country you live in. There are the metropolitan areas, west coast, east coast, Midwest, southwest, industrial areas as well as rural areas.
The type of area I will be discussing in this paper with be the rural area in northern Arizona. The access to health care is not always easy to get to because of the area, and the distance these families live from Healthcare facilities. Because of this limited access to healthcare, these families rely heavily on each other to maintain their health and well being. The area of nursing that I practice is Perioperative nursing. We deal with patients undergoing surgery procedures, a stressor to the individual as well as the family. The definition of family as defined by Sister Calista Roy is “family is an adaptive system that, like the individual, has inputs, internal control and feedback processes and output.” (Friedman 2003) With this definition we see that the family can help the individual cope with and adapt to their illness or surgical procedure. This definition is useful today, because we see more family involvement, being more informed through the media and the internet, even in a rural setting. They are included in all aspects of the patients visit to the hospital.
The belief that the family as a unit of care has been a focus of nursing for a long time. The...