Title : Establishing a Public Health Nursing Community of practice to support family resilience in Wales
Abstract:
Family resilience can be a predictor for school readiness( Brophy 2022) and family health and well being (Walsh 2017) . Assessment of family resilience is intrinsic to the role of the Public Health Nurse -Health Visitor policy (Wales Government 2016) and practice in Wales however is not always straight forward. Following development of an assessment tool for Public Health Nurses a community of practice for Public Health Nurse-Health Visitors (PHNHV) in Wales was established to provide a solution focused and supportive environment for health visitors to share their experience and support practice development when assessing and supporting the development of family resilience with the families that they work with. Communities of practice in education are not new however, research about communities of practice in health is limited. This research conducted through Group Concept Mapping identified the positive experiences of public health nurses who participate in a community of practice and identifies the key characteristics of a successful community of practice. Wales is a fairly small country with a population of 3.2 million 152583 of those are children (Stats Wales 2023) who will be assessed by PHNHV according to the Health Child Wales programme (Wales Government 2016). Family resilience is assessed using the Family Resilience Assessment Instrument and Tool (FRAIT) (Wallace et al 2017) which have been developed in partnership with PHNHVs. Barriers to use of the tool were identified and in 2019 an all Wales community of practice for PHNHV was established using Wenger’s principles for communities of practice (1998). Many of the participants have been involved in the development, pilot testing and validity testing of the FRAIT and support the education of PHNHV students. Initially meetings were held face to face and in different venues across Wales to enable attendance, since the COVID 19 pandemic meetings have moved to Microsoft Teams and are held 3 monthly for 2 hours. All notes from meetings are accessible to all PHNHVs via the FRAIT website. Current membership of the community of practice is 35 PHNHVs representing all 7 health boards in Wales.In 2021 group concept mapping research was used to establish health visitor experiences of participating in the community of practice for FRAIT Wales (Thomas 2021). Key findings were that the environment was educational, supportive and provided a network for professionals to voice opinions and receive support.Establishing a community of practice of PHNHV also provides a pool of practitioners who participate in further research addressing family resilience and development of evidence based validity tested assessment tools.
