Being there and being with families: Family understandings of public health nurse-family relationships.

As a phenomenon in nursing, the experience of presence is thought to unfold through relationships between nurses and their clients. Although literature on nurse-client relationships emphasizes the importance of presence few studies explore the phenomenon from the perspective of families. In this thesis I explore families' experience of nursing presence in their relationships with public health nurses. The intent is to understand how families experience presence and how nursing presence contributes to the development of relationships. Eight family interview transcripts were analyzed using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Analysis and interpretation of the transcripts revealed that families experience nursing presence when they work with nurses whose perceptual abilities and relationship skills enable them to intuit how to respond to and work with families in ways that are meaningful to the family. The study demonstrates the need for nurses to be responsive to families' needs as they shift and change over time. --Leaf ii.