Family Health Assessment
Family Health Assessment Using Gordon’s functional health patterns to assess a family will guide the nurse in developing a comprehensive nursing assessment that is holistic in nature. Gordon’s functional health patterns are founded on 11 principles that are incorporated within the nursing practice. These 11 principles serve as a framework for a thorough nursing assessment in which to build a holistic and individual family care plan (Grand Canyon University, 2011). The author has developed family-focused questions for each of the 11 principles and utilized these questions as a tool to assess her own family. This paper will summarize the family assessment that was performed by the author and discuss two wellness nursing diagnoses that relate to her family and suggest interventions that should be implemented for family goal attainment. In assessing the author’s family, using the questions that are attached, the author was able to provide a thorough and holistic health assessment of her family. The author discovered that in relation to values the family generally interacts with a calm and respectful tone that is typically laced with humor. However in stressful times the adults of the family take on a tone that is more rigid. Family goals are ever changing but the focus stays the same; these goals include maintaining and advancing the family’s health as a whole unit. Health perception can be a touchy subject in the house of the author, with the author being a nurse and wanting to focus on preventative medicine and the author’s husband being a rancher with the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. There tends to be some heated discussions on what is healthy and what is not healthy and the understanding of consequences that occur later in life. One example is the meals that are consumed; living on a ranch the author’s family has unlimited access to beef, not grass fed, lean beef, but really yummy, home grown, corn fat, beef, and they tend to eat a lot of it.
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