Abstract: The purpose of this research has been to trace the development of the nurse practitioner role in New Zealand. Using a discourse analytical approach informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the study foregrounds the discourses that have constructed the nurse practitioner role within the New Zealand social and political context. The author suggests that discourses of nursing and of medicine have established systems of disciplinary practices that produce nurses and physicians within defined role boundaries, not because of legislation, but because discourse has constructed certain rules. The nurse practitioner role transcends those boundaries and offers the possibility of a new and potentially more liberating identity for nurses and nursing. A plural approach of both textuality and discursivity was used to guide the analysis of texts chosen from published literature and from nine interviews conducted with individuals who have been influential in the unfolding of the nurse practitioner role. Both professionally and industrially and in academic and regulatory terms dating back to the Nurses Registration Act, 1901, the political discourses and disciplinary practices serving to position nurses in the health care sector and to represent nursing are examined. The play of these forces has created an interstice from which the nurse practitioner role in New Zealand could emerge. In combination with a new state regime of primary health care, the notion of an autonomous nursing profession in both practice and regulation has challenged medicine's traditional right to surveillance of nursing practice. Through a kind of regulated freedom, the availability of assessment, diagnostic and prescribing practices within a nursing discourse signals a radical shift in how nursing can be represented. The author concludes that the nurse practitioner polemic has revolutionised the nursing subject, and may in turn lead to a qualitatively different health service.

Abstract: This article examines the knowledge and power relationships between the medical profession and nurses during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that the 1901 Nurses' Registration Act allowed doctors to exert control over the nursing profession and that the hierarchal structure of the profession contributes to the culture of control and surveillance.

Abstract: This article reviews the development of the New Zealand nursing workforce, which has been shaped by social, political, scientific and interprofessional forces. The unregulated, independent and often untrained nurses of the early colonial period were succeeded in the early 1900s by registered nurses, with hospital-based training, working in a subordinate role to medical practitioners. In the mid/late 1900s, greater specialisation within an expanding workforce, restructuring of nursing education, health sector reform, and changing social and political expectations again reshaped nursing practice. Nursing now has areas of increasing autonomy, expanding opportunities for postgraduate education and leadership roles, and a relationship with medicine, which is more collaborative than in the past. Three current challenges are identified for nursing in New Zealand's rapidly evolving health sector; development of a nursing-focused knowledge culture, strengthening of research capacity, and dissemination of new nursing knowledge.

Abstract: This contemporary historical study examines the health sector environment of the 1990s and the turn of the 21st century, and assesses the policy initiatives undertaken to advance nursing in New Zealand during that period. The authors look at the conditions and forces that saw nursing achieve a new emphasis on advanced and expanded scope of nursing practice, less than a decade after the commencement of New Zealand's first pre-registration nursing degrees.

Abstract: This paper focuses on the history of Plunket nursing and Truby King's ideology and other dominant ideologies, during the years 1905 – 1920. To provide a context, the paper explores the development of a new nursing speciality – Plunket nursing, that became part of the backbone of a fledgling health system and the New Zealand nursing profession. Correspondingly, Truby King presented the country with a vision for improving infant welfare underpinned by his eugenics view of the world and his experimentation with infant feeding. The author argues that nurses were drawn to the work of the newly created Plunket Society and that the Society had lasting influence on the development of nursing in New Zealand.

Abstract: This study examines the discursive formation of professional nursing in one country, as revealed by the history of nursing in New Zealand. Michel Foucault's approach to historical research signifies a different level of analysis from conventional approaches, focusing not on the history of ideas but on an understanding of the present, a history of the present. A genealogical method derived from Foucauldian poststructuralism reveals how different understandings of nursing have occurred and have governed nursing practices and scholarship in different historical contexts. The archaeological investigation in this study reveals two moments of epistemic transformation, that is, two intervals of mutation and discontinuity. The Nightingale era in the 1880s precipitated the first epistemic shift – premodernism to modernism. The transfer of nursing education from hospital based training to the tertiary education sector, followed by the introduction of the baccalaureate degree, precipitated the second epistemic shift in the 1990s, the advent of postmodernism. Encompassing these two epistemes, six historical contexts are identified, where significant disruptions to the nursing discourses overturned previously held assumptions about what constituted a nurse. Each historical context is identified by specific discursive constructs. The first is colonial caring, the second the Nightingale ethos and the third heroic, disciplined obedience. In the fourth context, nursing is framed by, and within, discourses of skilled, humanistic caring, in the fifth, scientific, task focused managerialism, and in the 1990s, the sixth context, by multiple realities in an age of uncertainty.

Abstract: This thesis explores the shortage of general hospital nurses in post World War II New Zealand between 1945 and 1955. Historical inquiry is used to identify the causes of the shortage and the response to the shortage by the Health Department, hospital boards and nurse leaders. Christchurch Hospital, administered by the North Canterbury Hospital Board, is used to illustrate the situation at one large, public, general hospital. Primary sources provided the majority of material which informed this thesis. Two themes emerge regarding the causes of the shortage of nurses: those that were readily acknowledged by nurse leaders and other health professionals at the time, and those which were less widely discussed, but which contributed to the nature of nursing work appearing less attractive to potential recruits. In response to the shortage the Health Department, hospital boards and the New Zealand Registered Nurses Association mounted several recruitment campaigns throughout the decade. As the shortage showed no sign of abatement the focus turned from recruitment to retention of nurses. While salaries, conditions and training were improved, nurse leaders also gave attention to establishing what nurses' work was and what it was not. Nurse leaders and others promoted nursing as a profession that could provide young women with a satisfying lifelong career. Due to these efforts, by 1955, this episode in the cycle of demand and supply of nurses had begun to improve.

Abstract: Undertakes an analysis of past issues of Kai Tiaki over the five decades following its establishment in 1908 to identify the antecedents to the development of research in NZ nursing from the 1970s. Demonstrates how the journal fostered nurses' awareness of research and promoted nursing scholarship, by publishing case studies, holding essay competitions, and published nurses' articles on practice or professional issues.