ABSTRACT
Family-centred care is central to children and young people’s nursing across the world, yet it has been described as an ideal rather than a reality in practice. Crawford (2012) has highlighted the tension for children and young people’s nurses inherent in espousing family-centred care while also practicing evidence-based care, given the lack of evidence to support the efficacy of family-centred care. Furthermore, as a concept, family-centred care has its origins in the development of understanding the relationships between mothers and children in the early decades of the twentieth century (Shields 2011). Yet social change in more recent decades has led to greater diversity in the family structure and the roles that family members fulfil are becoming more diverse in the twenty-first century. Thus the practice of family-centred care has become more complex, presenting challenges to children and young people’s nurses, and revealed in this chapter through a critical appraisal of the evidence of the reality of current practice of child-and family-centred care in relation to different family members.
