From nurse education, clinical, or workforce issues through to healthy living, Nursing Review has it covered.

World first research showing sore throat clinics in South Auckland schools helped dramatically drop rheumatic fever rates justifies the hard work put in by nurses and whānau workers, says nurse leader and co-researcher Lizzie Farrell.

About 3500 nurses have so far taken part in the country's first nursing fatigue survey but researchers are keen for more – particularly mental health nurses – before the survey closes at the end of March.

Shift working nurses will be surveyed about fatigue-related errors during a major research project to develop a cutting-edge approach to managing nurse fatigue.

Investing in a national prevention programme could save 30,000 New Zealanders suffering a pressure injury each year, recommends a major report. The KPMG report, The Case for investment in: A quality improvement programme to reduce pressure injuries in New Zealand, was released recently by the Health Quality & Safety Commission, ACC and the Ministry of Health.

Filipino nurses are fast becoming a mainstay of the New Zealand health and aged care sector. FIONA CASSIE gained some insights into the nursing culture in the Philippines – a country estimated to have up to a staggering 200,000 unemployed nurses – during a brief visit to Manila, including why we shouldn’t take this workforce for granted.

FIONA CASSIE talks to Filipino nursing leaders about Filipino pay and working conditions, what makes them stay and how they hope to entice others to stay or return to the Philippines.

This year’s International Nurses Day (IND) toolkit has a Kiwi flavour. Nursing Review talks to JILL WILKINSON about her contribution to a resource used by more than 20 million nurses worldwide.

Visiting American nursing professor Margaret Hansen has set out to establish whether delivering complementary therapies – like nature and music – through mobile technologies is a feasible way of reducing anxiety and pain for surgical patients.

When people are suffering from a mental illness, eating healthily often falls by the wayside. But what if nutritional deficiencies are a contributing cause in the first place? Nursing Review talks to psychology professor Julia Rucklidge about the links between nutrition and mental illness.

JENNY CARRYER reports back on the issues, goals and tasks on the agenda of the national nursing taskforce.

Stereotypes, often perpetuated by media headlines and unconscious prejudices, can all affect how nurses relate to patients. In KATRINA FYERS and SALLIE GREENWOOD’s third and final article they look at how nurses can think in reflexive ways to be more culturally safe practitioners.

Bullying is prevalent in New Zealand workplaces and the ‘caring profession’ is far from an exception. Nursing Review reports on some challenging research on nurse bullying, some nurse leader thoughts on bullying and a nurse manager’s project to encourage nurses to be kinder to each other.

Nurses driving home from work probably know whether a shift felt ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. PhD researcher RHONDA McKELVIE wants to talk to nurses about the forces influencing safe, or unsafe, staffing.

How nurses relate to patients is integral to nursing. In their first article, KATRINA FYERS and SALLIE GREENWOOD looked at developing reflective skills to support self-knowledge and culturally safe practice. They now consider how self-knowledge enhances the concept of relational practice and draw examples from their research. 

In the latest battle in the pay parity war, the NZNO has presented a number of interventions to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on behalf of iwi provider nurses and health workers. 

KATHY HOLLOWAY looks at the importance of nurse leadership and teamwork when responding to the complex ‘wicked’ problems in the health system that have no easy answers.

Chubby, obese, fat, bariatric, heavy. Finding the right words is just one of nurse researcher Caz Hales’ projects for improving the care of very large patients. FIONA CASSIE finds out more.

Loneliness can be a precursor to depression in older people. NICKY DAVIES for her PhD thesis asked older people what they think loneliness actually is. FIONA CASSIE reports on the findings and the take-home messages for nurses working with older people who may be lonely… or just alone.

Workplace cyberbullying is an insidious form of bullying that can stalk you from the hospital to home via the phone in your pocket. Researcher Natalia D’Souza wants to talk to nurses who may have experienced unwanted aggressive behaviour via any form of electronic media from text and email to social media and instant messaging. FIONA CASSIE reports.

This year’s theme for International Nurses Day is ‘Nurses: A force for change’. Florence Nightingale was just such a force, using statistics and data to challenge practice and develop health policy. We talk to some nurse researchers about the motivation and goals of nurse research, background some researchers’ career paths and share some tips and advice for those who may wish to follow.

PROFESSOR JANE KOZIOL-McLAIN, a longstanding researcher into family violence, is leading a research team currently working with young people to develop a ‘healthy relationships’ smartphone app to be piloted in schools next year.

As our population ages, more and more people are living into old age with multiple long-term conditions. A University of Otago nurse-led randomised controlled trial is looking at whether training in both healthy living and mindfulness can make a difference to these people’s lives.

Venous leg ulcers (VLU) are an ‘orphan disease’ in which nurse researcher Dr Andrew Jull has a longstanding interest. He talks to Nursing Review about his team’s latest VLU research project – Asprin4VLU – his first, and one of New Zealand’s first ever nurse-led, randomised, controlled trials of a drug treatment.

How nurses responded to the challenges of post-quake Christchurch was the focus of a research project by the Joint Centre for Disaster Research. Nursing Review reports on centre researcher ZOE MOUNSEY’s presentation to the recent People in Disasters conference, where she shared insights on nurses’ coping mechanisms.

Research into insights gained by a ‘rapid scan’ survey of Nurse Maude’s district nurses 18 months after the February 2011 Canterbury earthquake was also shared at the People in Disasters Conference.

Nurse researcher JOCE STEWART believes some fun and camaraderie in the ward can only be healthy for both nurses and patients. Nursing Review shares tales of laughter, mischief and collegiality amongst nurses in the 1970s and 1980s from Stewart’s thesis oral history research.

Nursing Review looks at the extra expectations that are often placed on Māori and Pacific nurses and shares some advice for nurses and workplaces on how to avoid the risk of burnout.

Back in 1908, one of the country’s first Māori registered nurses and midwives, Akenehi Hei*, struggled to get the government to pay for her work. More than a century later, nurses working for Māori and iwi health providers are still struggling with pay equity issues, says Kerri Nuku, kaiwhakahaere of Te Rūnanga o Aotearoa NZNO.

FIONA ROWAN asks how well the caring profession cares for its own when nurses lose loved ones and shares findings from her survey of 70 bereaved nurses that indicate New Zealand could do better.

Challenges faced by India-trained nurse educator Reen Skaria prompted her to ask fellow overseas-trained nurse educators about their experiences of teaching in New Zealand. She shared her research findings, and some of her respondents' frank reflections, at last year’s Australasian Nurse Educators Conference (ANEC). Nursing Review reports.

Are nursing students more empathetic than their medical colleagues? Former nurse and medical education advisor Dr Peter Gallagher* and colleagues set out to test this hypothesis. Nursing Review reports that the findings may surprise.

New Zealand’s ageing population is experiencing an upsurge in common age-related eye diseases. Clinical nurse specialist VICKY MIYEONG YOU reports on an innovation at Greenlane Eye Centre that has seen nurses trained to deliver collaborative specialist treatment for one of these diseases – wet macular degeneration.

Nursing Review asked Health Workforce New Zealand for an opinion piece on HWNZ’s recent and future plans and on nursing’s role in that work and vision. Chair DES GORMAN and acting director RUTH ANDERSON responded.

As registered nurse prescribing inches closer, MARK JONES and JILL WILKINSON argue that prescribing innovations could be better and faster in the future if the Queen wasn’t involved. They are calling for the proposed new Medicines Act to see a handover in power for deciding nursing’s prescriptive authority from the Queen (ie, the Crown) to the Nursing Council.

PROFESSOR JENNY CARRYER calls for courageous disruption to ensure the new Health Strategy leads to changes in the health system with a positive impact on population health.

Nursing Review ended the year by asking a wide range of nursing and health leaders to assess and fill in a ‘report card’ on how they believed nursing and health fared in 2015. 

Is New Zealand ready for new graduate nurses with master’s degrees? Fiona Cassie reports on the advent of graduate-entry nursing programmes.

Paperless capture of vital signs is another step closer at Canterbury District Health Board with the rollout of electronic patient observations software and an early warning score (EWS) system now underway in the first ward. Nursing Review reports

A nursing mantra for much of the past two decades has been evidence-based practice. US nursing researcher Dr Karen Monsen believes it’s time to rethink that mantra and instead start mining ‘big data’ for practice-based evidence of expert nursing. Fiona Cassie reports.

Since Nursing Review published this shift work article earlier this year, New Zealand researchers have released a major literature review of the error rates of nurses working 12-hour shifts. 

Housing researcher NEVIL PIERSE talks to Nursing Review about getting the hard statistics and evidence to back healthy housing initiatives.

Research on a ‘smart inhaler’ that moos, miaows or rings out pop tunes and makes kids with asthma use their preventer more often won young hospital pharmacist Amy Chan the recent Medicines New Zealand 2015 Value of Medicines award.

Three Waikato DHB frontline staff were suspended this winter for refusing to wear a mask after declining the flu vaccine. FIONA CASSIE looks at the sometimes fraught issue of infection control campaigns that aim to reduce the risk of influenza by increasing the vaccination levels of nurses and other healthcare workers.

Attempts to have pressure injury data regularly collected and reported as a nationwide quality indicator have been unsuccessful to date. But four district health boards decided not to wait for the rest of the country. FIONA CASSIE finds out about the Northern Region’s successful campaign to reduce harm from pressure injuries. 

This edition's critically appraised topic (CAT) looks at research into a new addition to an established technique to restore a steady rhythm to a rapidly beating heart.

Nursing Review updates the next steps towards widened registered nurse prescribing in, hopefully, 2016.

The Nursing Council of New Zealand recently released the latest report in its Nursing Cohort longitudinal study, which includes an update on the number of nurses registered in the 2005/06 year who are still nursing in New Zealand. While the numbers, including new data on nurses first registered in 2012/13, are worryingly low, it’s not all doom and gloom. FIONA CASSIE reports.

Shiftwork isn’t natural, and long-term it isn’t healthy – but it is essential for modern health care. So the challenge is to minimise the risks and maximise any lifestyle benefits. FIONA CASSIE talks to a sleep physiologist and nurse leaders to find out how to do just that.

Four years on, Christchurch’s nurses are still driving on bumpy roads to workplaces that are often temporary or under repair before returning to a home that may still be cracked or leaking. And with a $650 million rebuild, redevelopment and reshuffle of hospital services underway over the next four years and increasing demand for mental health services, it seems there is little relief in sight.

On 28 February the fourth national MECA pay agreement between 20 district health boards and the New Zealand Nurses Organistion expired. FIONA CASSIE backgrounds the talks and some of the history leading up to the latest negotiations.

Can you halve the time student nurses spend on the ward or with a nurse in the community and still train a clinically competent nurse? A major US study has proven you can by replacing half the traditional clinical placement hours with quality simulation scenarios. 

FIONA CASSIE talks to nursing leader and Children's Team member Sonia Rapana about her role in the Children's Team initiative to help children not only survive but also thrive.

Nurses nationwide are invited to take part in a major online survey hoping to pinpoint the real differences between a staff nurse and a specialist nurse’s daily work.

Catch them young. Waikato DHB last year launched a leadership programme for high-flying nurses who stood out in their new graduate year. Some are now moving on to do their PhDs and other DHBs are adopting the model. FIONA CASSIE finds out more about the unabashedly “elitist” programme.

Disaster veteran and nurse leader Frances Hughes shares the findings of her Fulbright research into post-disaster responses and building resilient RNs.

JO ANN WALTON* argues that the public ­­– and some health colleagues – still need to be educated on the vital role of both “essential” and “inessential” nursing care.

JO ANN WALTON defends New Zealand nursing after being alarmed by a visitor’s comments. The Victoria University nursing professor and Nursing Council member gives her own appraisal of kiwi nursing.

Investing in nursing research appears to have paid dividends with the country’s nursing scholars stepping up a notch in the latest research quality rankings.

Most young nurses are passionate about their career choice ­ for now, at least. As many feel little long-term loyalty to a profession that leaves them feeling tired, stressed, and underappreciated, FIONA CASSIE talks to researcher Dr Isabel Jamieson about the workforce implications of her survey of more than 350 Generation Y nurses.

So-called ‘frequent fliers’ to emergency departments are often very unwell with complex health needs and feel they have little other option, a nurse research team has found. FIONA CASSIE talks to leader researcher Dr Kathy Nelson about some of her initial findings.

Timely phone calls after discharge can help the frail elderly stay well and stay home. FIONA CASSIE reports on Dr Claire Heppenstall’s PhD research into the frail elderly recently presented to the College of Nurses symposium.

Understand the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) FIONA CASSIE finds out more from public health campaigner Deborah Gleeson on why she believes nurses should know more.

FIONA CASSIE reports on  Canterbury DHB nurse leader, Becky Hickmott's and researcher Dr Claire Heppenstall's presentations (to the Baby Boomers & Beyond Symposium) on how  elderly evacuees fared after the mass rest home evacuations that followed the  February 2011 quakes in Christchurch.

Principal researcher VALERIE NORTON and novice research nurse LEANNE WALDEN reflect on how their respective roles in a palliative care research study flowed on to influence their nursing and research practice.

*Kathy Holloway’s timely PhD research has helped shape New Zealand’s first national process for endorsing specialty standards. Fiona Cassie reports.*

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The significance of Maori nurses in the “leadership, development and maintenance” of Maori health providers cannot be underestimated, a research report states.