Abstract: This article describes the care of a brain-dead intensive care unit patient. The human caring theory of Jean Watson is used to interpret the interactions between family, patient and nurse in this case study. Watson's concepts of care are examined as they relate to each stage of caring for the patient and his family.

Abstract: The public health nurses present a case study on adapting meningococcal disease public health protocols to work with the situation of a Cook Island family following the death of a member from meningococcal disease. They discuss the meningococcal disease epidemic in New Zealand and outline the signs and symptoms of the disease.

Abstract: This article is from a conference paper presented to the 12th World Conference on Surgical Patient Care. It presents cultural safety, as differentiated from transcultural nursing, and investigates how it relates to perioperative nursing. Examples are presented of how nurses can adhere to medical requirements, and address the cultural needs of Maori patients.

Abstract: This article examines a growing number of cases in New Zealand in which parents and guardians are required to make life and death ethical decisions on behalf of their seriously ill child. Increasingly, nurses and other practitioners are expected to more closely inform, involve and support the rights of parents or guardians in such situations. Differing moral and ethical values between the medical team and parents or guardians can lead to difficult decision making situations. The article analyses the moral parameters, processes, outcomes and ethical responses that must be considered when life and death ethical decisions involving children are made. It concludes with a recommendation that nurses should be recognised as perhaps the most suitable of all health care personnel when careful mediation is needed to produce an acceptable moral outcome in difficult ethical situations.

Abstract: This article examines the therapeutic relationship, a concept held by many to be fundamental to the identity of mental health nurses. While the therapeutic relationship was given formal expression in nursing theory in the middle of the last century, its origins can be traced to attendants' interpersonal practices in the asylum era. The dominance of medical understandings of mental distress, and the working-class status of asylum attendants, prevented the development of an account of mental health nursing based on attendants' relationships with asylum inmates. It was left to Peplau and other nursing theorists to describe mental health nursing as a therapeutic relationship in the 1940s and later. Some distinctive features of colonial life in New Zealand suggest that the ideal of the attendant as the embodiment of bourgeoisie values seems particularly unlikely to have been realised in the New Zealand context. However, New Zealand literature from the 20th century shows that the therapeutic relationship, as part of a general development of a therapeutic discourse, came to assume a central place in conceptualisations of mental health nursing. While the therapeutic relationship is not by itself a sufficient basis for professional continuity, it continues to play a fundamental role in mental health nurses' professional identity. The way in which the therapeutic relationship is articulated in the future will determine the meaning of the therapeutic relationship for future generations of mental health nurses.

Abstract: This research explores the issues and experiences of mental health nurses who experience or have experienced mental illness. This project was prompted by the author's concern for colleagues and friends in this situation. The research topic was approached using a mix of critical ethnography and action research principles. Five mental health nurses who all work for the same district health board were interviewed about their experiences of being mental health professionals with mental illness and the issues that arose from this. The themes that emerged from this research are: the reactions of nurse colleagues, the effects on participants' own mental health treatment, employer responses, professional experiences and issues and strategies for coping. Discussion and recommendations focus on the need for improvements to the responses that mental health nurses with experience of mental illness encounter in their workplace. Recommendations from this research encompass suggestions for both individual and organisational education, action and change.

Abstract: This literature review critically examines contributing factors to the current nursing shortage in New Zealand, centering on recruitment and retention of registered nurses. There is a dramatic widening between the supply of registered nurses and the demand for their services. All regions in New Zealand are reporting difficulty in hiring experienced and specialty nurses, and recruiting time is lengthening. This report suggests that the shortage is closely linked to factors in the nursing care environment. As a result of multiple factors during the centralising, cost-containing, acuity-increasing decade of the 1990s, the care environment has driven practising nurses out of acute care settings and discouraged new students from entering the profession. The availability of numerous alternative career opportunities has heightened the effect. Continuing causes to the non-selection of nursing as a profession are the influences of wage compression and limited career progression over the lifetime of the nurse, and insufficient orientation and mentoring of new nurses. Recent changes in the health care system have gone unevaluated and without oversight by nursing regulatory agencies – a situation not in the best interests of patients or nurses. A number of both literature-supported and resourceful approaches, including recommendations towards addressing the nursing shortage are proposed in this review.