Nursing practice in community child health: developing the nurse-client relationship

Community nursing services to parents with young children have been an established part of child health services in Australia for more than a century. Although the titles vary within states, community child health nurses provide support services for parents with infants and young children and typically their scope of practice includes public health functions such as health surveillance of the developing infant and child up to the age of 5 years and early intervention. More recently state health policies have instituted universal home visiting and emphasized the primacy of psychosocial support for parents. These policies are accompanied by education programs that propose a change in nursing practice to a more egalitarian partnership model of practice. As a consequence greater attention now has to be paid to the processes used in developing a working relationship with the client in the community setting. Whilst there has been little published in the Australian nursing literature on the methods used by community child health nurses to engage their clients, the international literature offers some insights into the nurses' practice. This paper describes the practices of community child health nurses in engaging the parent and developing a complementary and therapeutic relationship that enables the nurse to promote the health of the child and family. Published accounts of community child health nursing practice in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and northern America are described and compared to the Australian context.