Abstract: Research into the effects of dialysis treatment on Maori patients living in rural Northland has already brought changes to practice just one year after the research was completed. Li-Chin Shih completed a thesis entitled “Impact of Dialysis on Rurally Based Mäori Clients and Their Whänau” in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Nursing, The University of Auckland, 2009. This article in Kai Tiaki is based on this research.

Abstract: Surveys 52 staff members from the rest-home component of aged-care facilities in one District Health Board, about how staff in such facilities approach and manage the sexuality needs of residents.

Abstract: This paper claims rigour and sensitivity for a methodology used to explore multiple sources of data and expose the essential characteristics of a phenomenon in the human sciences. A descriptive phenomenological methodology was applied in a study of the experience of ten people with osteoarthritis receiving ginger compress therapy. The application of the phenomenological attitude, with reduction, bracketing and imaginative variation, allowed multiple sources of data-written, pictorial and oral – to be explicated. The applied methodology used is described in this paper, with its six clearly defined illustrated by examples from the study. The findings demonstrate that phenomenological reduction enabled an indication of the potential benefits of ginger compress treatment as a therapy for people with osteoarthritis.

Abstract: This research illuminates the challenges of living well within one's own family as a nurse caring for her own relative who is dying of a cancer-related illness. Developing a deeper awareness of the consequences of this caring work has been the central focus for inquiry in this research. Nursing requires epistemologies that encompass new ways of understanding how we live within our own families and communities and practice as nurses. The theoretical framework that guides this research interprets the French Philosopher Michel Foucault's (1926-1984) critical history of thought as an ethical project for nursing. It uses conceptual tools developed in his later writing and interviews to draw attention to how discursive knowledge and practices constitute subjectivity in relations of truth, power and the self's relation to the self. The first aspect of the analysis, landscapes of care examines the techniques of discourse as relations of power and knowledge that constitute nurse family members as subjects who have relationships with their own families and other health professionals. The second aspect analyses care of the self and others as self work undertaken to form the self as a particular kind of subject and achieve mastery over one's thoughts and actions.As an exploration of the complex and contradictory subjectivities of the nurse family member, this research illuminates the forms and limits of nursing practice knowledge. It shows how nursing is practised, and the identity of the nurse is created, through intellectual, political and relational work, undertaken on the self in relation to others, as modes of ethical engagement.