Nursing Praxis in New Zealand Inc

The Cartwright Report of the Cervical Cancer Inquiry of 1987/8 made detailed recommendations about the primacy of communication with respect to informed consent, specifically for women undergoing gynaecological examinations. This paper reports findings from a wider study into women's experiences of what makes examinations go well. The data are specific to nurses and a subset of women participants. Data are from semi-structured interviews with six nurses, and seven women who had attended a sexual health clinic and had a speculum examination...

The purpose of this study was to examine the introduction of nurse prescribing in New Zealand, especially with respect to the basis of concerns related to level of knowledge and skills required of practitioners for safe prescribing; and further to compare experiences in New Zealand with those in other countries where nurses are authorised to prescribe. It is argued that prescribing rights previously extended to Nurse Practitioners and now being extended to other groups of nurses, and also to other health professions, is a matter provoking concern with respect to patient safety and adequacy of educational preparation...

This is the second part of a historical review of the New Zealand child health and development record book (also known as the Well Child/Tamariki Ora Health book or Plunket book). It focuses on the years between 1945 and 2000. The first article highlighted how the book documented the development of "scientific mothering", which marginalized women-generated mothering knowledge. The present article highlights how during the reviewed time period women began to challenge notions of "scientific mothering", these changes are signaled in the content of the Well Child/Tamariki Ora Health book over time...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This study aimed to clarify whether a collaborative exercise using a Wiki to teach nursing students health-specific terminology resulted in better learning. In one New Zealand School of Nursing a list of health-related and discipline-specific terms was created, first-year nursing students were expected to learn these before their initial clinical practice. However, students found the terms difficult to learn. The use of a collaborative Wiki exercise to create a glossary of health terms was seen as a way to aid student learning, while also providing a learning environment where students would develop collaborative skills...

The New Zealand child health and development record book (also known as the Well Child/Tamariki Ora Health Book or Plunket book) has recorded the history of infant-rearing practices in New Zealand for almost 100 years. Since its initial publication it has been used by mothers and health professionals to track the health and development of children under the age of five years. The book also provides insight on the development of mothering practices and provides commentary on the medicalisation of mothering and the emergence of mothering as a science from the time of its inception...

Clinical trials are carried out with human participants to answer questions about the best way to diagnose, treat and prevent illness. Participants must give informed consent to take part in clinical trials that requires understanding of how clinical trials work and their purpose. Randomised controlled trials provide strong evidence but their complex design is difficult for both clinicians and participants to understand. Increasingly, ensuring informed consent in randomised controlled trials has become part of the clinical research nurse role...

The turn of the century has seen an increase in reported cases of sexually transmitted infections including the human immunodeficiency virus, particularly in groups of men who have sex with men. Both internationally and in New Zealand the implementation of social marketing human immunodeficiency virus prevention programmes are identified as appropriate mechanisms to promote condom use in men who have sex with men. This paper presents a review of the literature on research-based social marketing initiatives designed to decrease sexually transmitted infections, including the human immunodeficiency virus, through an increase in condom use by men who have sex with men...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The poor health status of indigenous people has been identified internationally as a critical issue. It is now commonly accepted that the ability to address this concern is hindered, in part, by the disproportionately low number of indigenous health professionals, including nurses. This paper reports the findings of a review of literature that aimed to identify key barriers in the education of the indigenous undergraduate nursing students in the tertiary sector, to identify strategies to overcome these, and discuss these elements within the New Zealand context...

AIM: The Diabetes Get Checked programme provided a free annual diabetes check to people diagnosed with diabetes. The aim of the present study was to ascertain the impact this programme had on the practice of nurses; identify factors that nurses consider contributed to the success or failure of the programme in their work setting; and to elicit nurses' suggestions for future improved management and outcomes for people with diabetes. METHOD: An observational study utilising an online survey was undertaken...

Heart failure is a chronic debilitating disease with significant hospitalisation rates. Information and education are foundational elements in making the lifestyle changes required for effective self-management of the symptoms of heart failure. This paper reports a study of medical nurses' education activities with heart failure patients in terms of the topics they addressed and the educational resources they found most useful. A random sample of 540 medical ward nurses were surveyed in 2009 using a postal questionnaire...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Advance directives are one aspect of advance care planning designed to improve end of life care. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation released their first mission statement in 2010 concerning advance directives suggesting an increase in the use of these. A burgeoning older population, expected to rise over the next few years, places the primary healthcare nurse in a pivotal role to address the challenges in constructing advance directives. While literature supports the role for primary healthcare nurses in promoting advance directives, no research was found on this role in the New Zealand context...

Optimised glycaemic management during hospital admission is critical to good patient outcomes. Inpatient hypoglycaemia is associated with increased morbidity and mortality during the hospital stay and post-discharge. To mitigate the deleterious effects of hypoglycaemia, many hospitals have an inpatient protocol to guide clinicians. Earlier research has shown that nurses fail to follow such protocols. This descriptive study used a retrospective audit of inpatients' treatment and progress notes to examine nursing adherence to a hypoglycaemia protocol...

Cardiovascular disease has been identified as a leading cause of mortality in New Zealand. It is therefore of little surprise that the New Zealand Health Strategy has identified cardiovascular health as a target area for improved management. A main contributor to cardiovascular disease is coronary artery disease, which can lead to acute coronary syndromes such as myocardial infarction. Cardiac rehabilitation should be offered to those who have suffered from a coronary event, with the aim of improving quality of life for the client and reducing the incidence of further cardiac episodes...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Current research has confirmed that cigarette smoking is a risk factor for cervical cancer. Although more recently, there has been a slight decline in smoking rates, the relationship between tobacco use and cervical cancer remains clear. The development of research-based knowledge with which to inform the profession will assist practitioners to promote smoke-free practices for women and their families. The aim of this study was to identify whether female smokers referred to the colposcopy department at a city hospital required more follow-up visits, treatments and re-referrals than did nonsmokers...

The development of research capability in New Zealand nursing can be seen particularly from the 1970s onwards. However, by analysing past issues of Kai Tiaki - the country's longstanding nursing journal - over the five decades following its establishment in 1908, the present authors identified two precursors to this later stage. The journal fostered nurses' awareness of research and consistently promoted nursing scholarship. Successive editors developed nurses' capability in writing about their practice by publishing case studies, the winning essays in competitions run jointly with the professional association and nursing schools, and nurses' articles on practice or professional issues...

This paper argues that the globalisation of nursing and the internationalisation of nursing education have lead to Western values being embedded into nursing curricula in nations where the cultural values and beliefs may be based in quite different philosophies. It argues for critical examination of assumptions underpinning ethics education in nursing and proposes that the principles of cultural safety need to be incorporated into ethics education to create a culturally safe ethic for both nurses and patients in a multicultural healthcare environment...