Advances in Family Care: Challenges, Innovations, and Perspectives for Comprehensive Health Care

Dear Colleagues,

Knowledge about families is not static. It is continually constructed and reconstructed, dynamically, in line with social transformations. This drives us to seek to understand the complexity of the countless phenomena related to the health–disease process that affect families and those they encounter.

Various circumstances, such as new family arrangements, migration flows, care for people with chronic conditions, violence within the family, and others, directly impact the daily lives of healthcare professionals working in hospitals, homes, primary care, schools, community spaces, and more. These realities require reflection and focus, ensuring that care is increasingly qualified and effective in addressing the unique demands of family systems comprising families that reinvent themselves and manifest themselves in a wide variety of ways.

Thus, bridging the gap between the care offered and the needs of families remains a challenge. Therefore, it is essential to discuss possibilities and implement actions that consider their potential, unique characteristics, and demands, with the aim of promoting the quality of life and health of individuals throughout their different life cycles, the family system, and the community as a whole. Therefore, healthcare is more efficient and strengthened when professionals think and act in partnership with those who need it, together building new ways of providing care, learning, and transforming practices. Considering the imperative of moving from the production of scientific evidence to practice, we are pleased to invite researchers working in research, teaching, and family care to share their findings with the scientific community.

We welcome original research articles, reviews, reflections, opinion pieces, and experience reports. Submissions on the following are particularly welcome:

• Challenges, advances, and perspectives in the family field, with the aim of promoting individual and community health;
• Innovations in care, strategies, and tools for approaching the family in different healthcare contexts;
• Knowledge translation processes that bridge research and professional practice to promote comprehensive care innovations and outcomes;
• Successful experiences that strengthen individual and community health by focusing on the family.

Our aim is to work together to build pathways that will enable us to move beyond the model of caring for individuals and "diseases" to one that recognizes the family as an essential unit of care for health. Care shaped by the professional's posture and attitude, even when dealing with a single individual, never loses sight of the fact that they are part of a network of interactions, including the family, with all its complexity, resilience, ambiguity of existence, and capacity to live, not just survive.

We await your contributions and are certain that they will strengthen the science and practice of family health.

Dr. Sônia Silva Marçon
Prof. Dr. Eda Schwartz
Guest Editors

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