Abstract: The aim of this paper is to report a study to compare the diabetes-related work roles, training and attitudes of practice nurses in New Zealand surveyed in 1990 and 1999, to consider whether barriers to practice nurse diabetes care changed through that decade, and whether ongoing barriers will be addressed by current changes in primary care. Questionnaires were mailed to all 146 practice nurses in South Auckland in 1990 and to all 180 in 1999, asking about personal and practice descriptions, practice organisation, time spent with patients with diabetes, screening practices, components of care undertaken by practice nurses, difficulties and barriers to good practice, training in diabetes and need for further education. The 1999 questionnaire also asked about nurse prescribing and influence on patient quality of life. More nurses surveyed in 1999 had post-registration diabetes training than those in 1990, although most of those surveyed in both years wanted further training. In 1999, nurses looked after more patients with diabetes, without spending more time on diabetes care than nurses in 1990. Nevertheless, they reported increased involvement in the more complex areas of diabetes care. Respondents in 1999 were no more likely than those in 1990 to adjust treatment, and gave a full range of opinion for and against proposals to allow nurse prescribing. The relatively low response rate to the 1990 survey may lead to an underestimate of changes between 1990 and 1999. Developments in New Zealand primary care are likely to increase the role of primary health care nurses in diabetes. Research and evaluation is required to ascertain whether this increasing role translates into improved outcomes for patients.

Abstract: This article outlines a model for the nursing role in the chronic health care context of renal replacement therapy. Materials from several streams of literature are used to conceptualise the potential for nursing work in the renal setting as negotiated care. In order to present the role of the renal nurse in this way it is contextualised by viewing the renal setting as a specialised social context constituted by a dominant professional discourse and a contrasting client discourse. While performing specific therapeutic activities in accord with the dominant discourse, renal nurses can develop a relationship with the person living on dialysis, based on responsiveness to their subjective experience reflecting the renal client discourse. In contrast to the language of noncompliance prevalent in the renal setting, nurses can, through their relationship with renal clients, facilitate their attempts to negotiate the requirements of the therapeutic regime into their own personal life situation. Nurses can mediate between the dominant and client discourses for the person living on dialysis. Care describes the quality that nurses actively seek to create in their relationships with clients, through negotiation, in order to support them to live as fully as possible while using renal replacement therapy. The author concludes that within chronic health care contexts, shaped by the acute curative paradigm of biomedicine, the model of nursing work as negotiated care has the potential to humanise contemporary medical technologies by responding to clients' experiences of illness and therapy.