Last week was the Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) 29th International Nursing Research Congress being held in Melbourne, Australia. We were delighted to be able to showcase our achievements since launching the recently established International Network of Child and Family Centred Care (INCFCC) at the conference.  We launched the network in 2017 followingemail communications between international nurse academics and practitioners working with children and families, that resulted in a debate on the conceptual and operational definition, education, practice and research initiatives underpinning child and family centredcare. What was evident in these was a passion and desire to explore, critique and build on the present state of the science for child and family centred models of care, reflecting an international perspective. Despite child and family centred care being consistent with ideals of empowerment, autonomy and human rights, there remains a lack of evidence on the feasibility, appropriateness, meaning and effectiveness of these models on health outcomes for the child, parent, and family (Shields et al., 2012, Watts et al., 2014). We anticipate the international research network will result in knowledge exchange and collaborative research from an internationally informed perspective. The STTI’s aims to advance world health and celebrate nursing excellence in scholarship, leadership globally, reflecting the ethos of the INCFCC.  Despite being in its infancy, we are proud of our collaborations and achievements to date which have included:

• A Twitter Chat in January 2017 onlosing the child’s voice and ‘the captive mother’ resulted in 225,4826 impressions
• A published article based on the Twitter Chat: Smith, J., Shields, L., Neill, S. & Darbyshire P. (2017)Losing the child’s voice and ‘the captive mother’: An inevitable legacy of family-centred care? Evidence-Based Nursing, 20, 67-69 (Smith et al., 2017).
• Conference Symposium: Dialogue on family-focused care, family-centred care and child-centred care: Generating the evidence and ethics, Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Research Conference, Dublin, (Shields et al., 2017).
• Poster presentation: Developing an International child and family-centred care Research Network, Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Research Conference, Melbourne (Foster et al., 2018).

References

Shields, L., Zhou, H., Pratt, J., Taylor, M., Hunter, J., & Pascoe, E. (2012) Family-centred care for hospitalised children aged 0-12 years.Cochrane Database Systematic Reviews, Issue 2.

Watts, R., Zhou, H., Shields, L., Taylor, M., Munns, A., & Ngune, I. (2014) Family-centered care for hospitalized children aged 0-12 years: a systematic review of qualitative studies. JBI Database of Systematic Reviews & Implementation Reports, 12 (7), 204-283.