Abstract: This thesis focuses on the experience of being human as process in order to reveal being. Illness and health are seen as reflections of this process of revelation. This work argues that health and illness are physical expressions of consciousness and therefore an outcome of what a human being has thought. In this way, this work shows how thought/intent serves to create life in the moment. In this understanding lies the potential to change reality, to change life. The thesis identifies self-responsibility as the key to changing consciousness. Taking responsibility for the creation of one's reality eliminates the human tendency to blame another for what is experienced in life. To that end, this work argues, we are each free to choose what is felt in response to life. In so doing, we can become conscious that life is a choice, that is to be approached from either the position of perfection, or excellence. The author proposes that, in the understanding that human beings are the creators of their reality, it is possible to conceive of care in nursing that is directed at changing thinking/thought. Such change would be to focus on the excellence of life, and in that way enact care in nursing that is an enabling through a process of being that is an emotional allowance in response to life. To this end, this work is titled Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis. The aesthetic is emotion and feeling. Praxis, is presented in its dialectical relationship of thought and action that is then bound to emotion and feeling in such a way that it illuminates the nature of thinking. This way of thinking, this work shows, is transformatory. Where transformation is a process of being that as a state of excellence is one of incremental human freedom accompanied by incremental responsibility.

Abstract: This study, which is methodologically grounded in qualitative research and philosophically informed by critical social science, explores aspects of the socio-political context in which practice nurses and general practitioners (core primary health care team) work within a team environment. It is indicated in the literature that there are benefits for improved health care through the development of collaborative teamwork. However, there have been many barriers identified which prevent collaborative teamwork. Amongst the many barriers, is the lack of role clarity and attitudinal differences. This thesis explored and highlighted whether the lack of role clarity and attitudinal differences do indeed impede the team's success, and are barriers to teamwork. The views and opinions of practice nurses and general practitioners and the understanding of their own and each other's current roles within the general practice setting were explored. The participants had the opportunity to discuss together, in focus group meetings, their thoughts on the topic. This raised their awareness of their taken for granted ideas on role and teamwork. Focus groups offered the participants the added opportunity to question each other which allowed for a deeper and more fulfilling understanding of role. New understandings that emerged could lead to alternative models of health care and influence the future delivery and planning of general practice. The thesis concludes by offering a potentially suitable model/framework which has been developed to further the understanding of teamwork in the future.

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.

Abstract: This is the second of a series of research projects undertaken to present the contemporary picture of the nurse workforce and their work in rural settings to inform policy for development of rural healthcare. The document presents the findings of telephone interviews with nurses in different work rural work settings around the country discussing their practice. The analysis identified a framework of four models of nursing practice: two traditional models defined by the institutions employing nurses, and two emerging models defined by the new positions requiring nurses to respond directly to health need.