Abstract: Based on qualitative research conducted in New Zealand and the Western Isles with rural primary care nurses and Family Health Nurses respectively, this thesis explores the ways that nurses construct flexible generalist professional identities that challenge traditional inter and intra-professional boundaries. Rhetoric of 'crisis' is often utilised to raise political awareness of the problematic, but in fact, rural general practitioner recruitment and retention has been documented for about a hundred years. For about the same length of time nurses have been providing primary health care services in rural and remote places, often working alone. In the New Zealand case, rural primary care nurses negotiate the boundaries between nursing and medicine, those within nursing itself, and also those between nursing a paramedic work. Nurses perform this boundary work by negotiating self-governing 'appropriate' and 'safe' professional identities. In the Western Isles case, the introduction of the newly developed role of Family Health Nurse serves to highlight the problematic nature of inserting an ostensibly generalist nursing role beyond the rural.
