Abstract: This research project was undertaken to inform nurse educators in the Department of Nursing and Health Studies of Manukau Institute of Technology of the employment opportunities for new graduate nurses emerging from the three year degree and registration programme. Graduates from the programme for the previous three years were surveyed for their experiences in gaining employment. 89.8% of graduates were successful in gaining employment in the first three months post registration. The number of graduates employed within a district health board declined across the three years but there were no significant differences between cohorts. Overall, 73% of graduates were employed into new graduate positions. The majority of graduates felt that their nursing education prepared them well for their role as a registered nurse. The findings of the qualitative data identified a strong need for science throughout the degree; longer clinical blocks; increased hands on experience; more practice with skills and less theory in relation to practical experience.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the structure and processes of an eighteen month, distance education course focused on developing advanced practice in the context of critical care nursing. Within the framework of a Master of Health Science, the postgraduate certificate (critical care nursing) was developed as a collaboration between Auckland University of Technology and two regional health providers. Students enrol in science and knowledge papers concurrently then, in the second half of the course, are supported within their practice environment to acquire advanced clinical skills and to analyse, critique and develop practice within their specialty. This course is set against a background of increasing interest in education post registration. The acquisition of highly developed clinical capabilities requires a combination of nursing experience and education. This requires collaboration between clinicians and nurse educators, and approaches to address accessibility of relevant educational opportunities for nurses outside the country's main centres.

Abstract: In 1973, two trial pre-registration nursing education programmes were piloted in New Zealand polytechnics. These represented an alternative to traditional hospital-sited schools of nursing. The establishment of nursing education in the tertiary sector marked a radical challenge to the cultural heritage of apprenticeship-style nursing training associated with paternal and medically-dominated health institutions. This thesis offers a Foucauldian and feminist poststructuralist analysis of discourses employed by fifteen senior nursing educators in the comprehensive registration programmes between 1973 and 1992. The women employed to teach in the comprehensive programmes faced unique challenges in establishing departments of nursing, in developing curricula that would promote a reorientation of nursing and in supporting candidates to attain their nursing registration. Through semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis methods, a set of unique characteristics shared by this group of early leading comprehensive nursing educators has emerged. The women's narratives were underpinned by discourses that centre around the valuing of education as a vehicle for emancipation and an upholding of a legitimacy of difference in nursing educators' work. The participants upheld the importance of clinical practice skills and drew on their own student nursing experiences as incentives for reforming nursing education. These nursing educators conceptualised an idealised type of graduate, and commonly employed an heroic metaphor to describe their experiences as senior comprehensive educators. Their engagement with such discourses and their shared characteristics demonstrate unique re-constitutions of power, knowledge and relations with their colleagues and clients throughout the education and health care sectors. The author proposes that these traits characterise the women as strategic and astute professionals who successfully negotiated the construction of comprehensive nursing programmes as a legitimate and transformative preparation for nursing registration.