Friedman Family Assessment

Friedman Family Assessment

Shirley Lemacks

Nursing 405

September 16, 2012

Willadene Walker-Schmucker

Friedman Family Assessment

A nursing assessment of a family is the basis of nursing interventions. By using a systematic process, the identification of family problem areas and strengths can be considered as the building blocks for interventions. This may also add to the resilience of the family dynamics. To protect this family’s identity the names, addresses and phone numbers have been omitted. To distinguish between the members only their initials and last names are used. The Edwards family consists of three members: the mother, ME who is 82 years old, a daughter, JEC who is 60 years old, and a grandson, RC, who is 32 years old. The family assessment follows in the appendix.

Nursing Diagnosis

The first nursing diagnosis would be Family Coping, Ineffective: Disabling related to JEC’s feelings of low self-esteem, hostility and anger as evidence by agitation, depression, and threatening remarks made to ME and on their Facebook pages and RC’s feelings of depression and anger as evidenced by a problem with substance abuse. Nursing interventions for this diagnosis would be to promote wellness by referring the family to a family counselor, RC to an individual therapy and substance abuse clinic. According to Healthy People 2020, the indicator would be mental health, using “MHMD-8 Employment of persons with mental illness and MHMD11-Depression screening by primary care providers (p.225). Another intervention would be to provide assistance to enable the family to deal with the current situation with active listening techniques and information on community support groups.