Aim. The aim of this paper is to propose a guideline for spiritual assessment and interventions explicitly for families, while considering each family member's unique spirituality.

Background. Spirituality's positive effect is pervasive in health care and in the lives of many families; therefore, there is a need to integrate spiritual assessment and interventions in total family care.

Discussion. The majority of published guidelines on spiritual assessment and interventions are designed predominantly for individuals. They fail to differentiate between individual and family spirituality or offer only brief discussions on family spirituality. Such guidelines are potentially problematic. They may lead nurses to focus only on individual spirituality and neglect to discern family unit spirituality or recognize the presence of conflicts in spiritual perspectives within the family. While other disciplines such as social work and family therapy have several guidelines/strategies to assess family spirituality, there is a dearth of such guidelines in the family health nursing and spirituality literature, in spite of the rhetoric about incorporating spirituality as part of total family assessment. As a beginning solution, guidelines are proposed for spiritual assessment and interventions for the family as a unit, and the category of spiritual interpretation to represent diagnosis is introduced. Case studies exemplify how to integrate the guideline, and illustrate elements that may favour specific interpretations which would guide the interventions.

Conclusion. As nurses continually strive to assist families with their health needs, they must also attend to their spiritual needs, as one cannot truly assess a family without assessing its spirituality.

Aims and objectives. This study set out to explore, from the family's point of view, ways in which nursing staff can promote family health during the child's hospital stay.

Background. Having a child in hospital is a major source of stress and anxiety for the whole family. Earlier studies have described parental coping strategies, ways to strengthen those strategies and to support parental participation in child care, but no one has studied the promotion of family health during the child's hospitalization from the family's point of view.

Design. Interviews were conducted in 2002 with 29 families who had a child with a chronic illness which were receiving or had received treatment on the paediatric wards of two Finnish hospitals.

Methods. Data analysis was based on the grounded theory method, proceeding to the stage of axial coding. Data collection and analysis phases proceeded simultaneously.

Results. Five domains were distinguished in the promotion of family health: (1) reinforcing parenthood, (2) looking after the child's welfare, (3) sharing the emotional burden, (4) supporting everyday coping and (5) creating a confidential care relationship.

Conclusions. The results strengthen the knowledge base of family nursing by showing how nursing staff can promote family health during the child's hospital stay.

Relevance to clinical practice. The results have a number of practical applications for nursing, both for clinical practice and research. The results can be used in paediatric hospital wards caring for chronically ill children and their families. The five domains of family health promotion described here should be tested in other paediatric wards and in other geographical locations.