Palliative care: a need for a family systems approach

When a family member is faced with a terminal illness, the impending death presents a crisis and a challenge to the entire family as a system. This article highlights the importance of caring for a family when one member has a life-threatening illness, and describes the applicability of Family Systems Theory and its major tenets to the palliative cancer population.

A MedLine and CINAHL search of Family Systems Theory related papers was conducted.

Research studies that have been done fail to capture the view of the entire family system, often limiting the perspectives of the family to one single member. The concepts of holism, balance, boundaries, and hierarchal subsystems must be addressed in the care of any family, including those who have a family member who is dying.

A Family Systems Theory framework can be useful in helping health care providers, and particularly nurses, deliver optimal care to palliative cancer patients and their families and standardize the way research is done by providing an appropriate framework with which to study the family. In addition, the adoption of Family Systems Theory as the standard framework from which to study families in palliative care will provide consistency for future studies that is presently lacking. Finally, nursing interventions to care for the family are suggested based on Family Systems Theory.