Nurses' work with empowerment during encounters with families in child healthcare

Abstract

One goal of Swedish child healthcare work is to empower parents, and thereby reinforce them in their parental roles. It may, however, be difficult to put this ideology into practice because the concept of empowerment is abstract, and because it is unclear what this concept means in practice. The overall aim of this article is to examine critically and discuss empowerment in nurses' work, in their everyday encounters with families in child healthcare. An empirical study was conducted at three child health centres in medium-sized towns in Sweden. Data collection consisted of audiotapes of 44 visits by families to nurses at these centres. The tape-recorded conversations were transcribed verbatim and have been used as data. Data were analysed qualitatively by examining the advice-giving sequences, to see the extent to which the nurse tried to involve and encourage parents to participate actively in problem solving, and how frequently the nurse enquired about the parents' opinions and ideas. It was revealed that the nurses dominated advice giving in these visits to the extent that they took the initiative in the majority of the advisory sequences that occurred, and that they decided both when advice should be given and the nature of the advice. Furthermore, there were remarkably few examples that could be called empowering or have an empowering function in the advice giving. The nurse instead gave standard solutions and answers in response to various questions from the parents, reinforcing her own role as an expert.