Developing a Contemporary Definition of Family Nursing Using Scoping Review Methodologies

Objective:

To map the literature to determine a contemporary, succinct definition of family nursing that can be used by health professionals, including nurses, nurse scientists, nurse educators, and policy makers across the globe, to inform scientific development of family nursing.

Introduction:

This project addresses the disciplinary need to clearly articulate the meaning of family nursing.

Exclude criteria:

Sources focused on family therapy or marriage and family therapy (MFT).

Inclusion criteria:

Concept: family nursing. Context: across the continuum of care from direct care inpatient settings to within the community in any country worldwide. Participants: individual family members; family dyads or subsets or subsystems; family caregivers; or the family unit.

Methods:

Key information sources will be disciplinary data bases, professional nursing associations, and texts (research, theoretical, philosophical, clinical, research, and educational texts) and grey literature (e.g., policies, dissertations, theses, and reports). A database search that was unlimited in dates will be used. Exploration will be in documents written in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, or Spanish languages (s). If searches result in sources other than these languages, consultation with native speakers of those languages will be sought from within professional networks of the authors. Titles, abstracts, and full-text articles will reviewed by at least two reviewers with conflicts resolved through discussion with a third reviewer. Data will be extracted from full texts, analyzed, and categorized. Results will be used to create a preliminary definition of family nursing for review by consultants with expertise in family nursing and revision by the study team.