The Canadian nurse
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Nurses are beginning to realize that clients' deficits influence family members and, conversely, that family members play an important role in the development and resolution of these deficits. The authors attempted to find published literature describing a family nursing evaluation based upon Orem's conceptual framework. Previous nursing research has described how Orem's model is applied to nursing interventions with individual clients, but none has addressed the application of nursing interventions to multiperson units within a family situation. ⋯ This article reviews the three basic concepts found within Orem's conceptual framework: self-care; self-care deficit, and nursing systems. The authors also outline their theoretical assumptions for the use of this approach with family nursing interventions, based upon six functional dimensions of the family as described by Epstein et al. and Guttman. In addition, the article provides a concrete example of how nursing evaluation can be structured within this scheme of reference.