Abstract: This article looks at the role of technology in nursing, and the interaction between it and human compassion and caring. The interface between critical care technologies and caring is explored, along with the social and political issues facing critical care areas.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses of scientific mothercraft and their implications for the nurse-mother relationship, drawing on the author's recent research into surveillance and the exercise of power in the child health nursing context. The application of Foucauldian discourse analysis to the texts generated by interviews with five New Zealand child health nurses confirms that this paradoxical role has never been fully resolved. Plunket nurses primarily work in the community with the parents of new babies and preschool children. Their work, child health surveillance, is considered to involve routine and unproblematic practices generally carried out in the context of a relationship between the nurse and the mother. However, there are suggestions in the literature that historically the nurse's surveillance role has conflicting objectives, as she is at the same time an inspector and family friend.

Abstract: This qualitative thesis uses discourse analysis to examine parental resistance towards medical treatment of critically ill children. It is an investigation of the 'mobile and transitory' discourses at play in instances of resistance between parents, physicians and nurses within health care institutions, and an examination of the consequences of resistance through providing alternative ways of perceiving and therefore understanding these disagreements. The philosophical perspectives, methodology and methods used in this thesis are underpinned by selected ideas taken from the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and supported by relevant literature in the fields of media, law, children, parenting, caring, serious childhood illness, medicine and nursing. It is argued that from an examination of interview based texts, parental resistance is an omnipresent but transitory occurrence that affects many of the interactions between the parents of seriously ill children and clinical staff. It is maintained that within these interactions, the seeds of this resistance are sown in both critical decision making situations and in everyday occurrences between doctors, nurses and parents within healthcare institutions. Contributing factors to parental resistance include the use of power games by staff, the language of medicine, forms of symbolic violence, the presence or absence of trust between parents and medical staff, the effects of medical habitus, and challenges to the parental role and identity. Overall, it is proposed in this thesis that parents who resist treatment for their seriously ill child are not exceptions to the normative patient-physician relationship.

Abstract: Explores, through the use of focus groups, ways in which community based nurses interact with family as a whole. Identifies Public health, Practice, District, Well child health and rural nurses as all having an integral role in building relationships with family to ensure child and family health. Suggests the findings point to a need for the establishment of a recognised family/family health nursing role.