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Litchfield, M. (1986). Thinking through diagnosis: Process in nursing practice. Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 1(4), 9–12.
Abstract: A paper following on from the paper “Between the idea and reality” (Nursing Praxis in New Zealand 1(2), 17-29) proposing the focus for the discipline of nursing – practice and research – is diagnosis. For nursing practice, diagnosis is a practice that collapses “The Nursing Process”; for research to develop nursing practice, diagnosis is one continuous relational process that merges and makes the separate tasks od assessment, intervention and evaluation redundant.
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Litchfield, M. (1989). Knowledge embedded in practice. Kai Tiaki: Nursing New Zealand, 82(10), 24–25.
Abstract: A statement of the nature of research needed to distinguish the knowledge of nursing practice from knowledge developed by other disciplines. It orients to the interrelationship of practice and research as the foundation of the discipline of nursing.
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Litchfield, M. (1986). Between the idea and reality. Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 1(2), 17–29.
Abstract: A paper presented as one of the four “Winter Lecture Series” hosted by the Nursing Studies unit of the Department of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. It is a critique of “ The Nursing Process” referred to commonly in nursing education programmes. It challenges the usefulness for nursing of the linear sequence of steps of assessment, diagnosis, planning, intervention and evaluation.
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Connor, M. (2004). The practical discourse in philosophy and nursing: An exploration of linkages and shifts in the evolution of praxis. Nursing Philosophy, 5(1), 54–66.
Abstract: This paper, firstly, examines the linkages and shifts in the evolution of of praxis. The concept of praxis, also known as the practical discourse in philosophy, has been expressed in different ways in different eras. However, the linkages from one era to another and from one paradigm to another are not well explicated in the nursing literature. Blurring of the linkages occurred from the popular association of praxis within the emancipatory paradigm. Integral to the concept of praxis, since the time of Aristotle, is the notion of phronesis: a process of moral reasoning enacted to establish the 'good' of a particular situation, often referred to as practical wisdom. Secondly, the paper, promotes and affirms the importance of praxiological knowledge development in the discipline. Furthermore, increased appreciation of the concept of praxis provides an important vehicle for the advancement of nursing as a moral endeavour and the nurse as moral agent.
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Bridgen, A. F. (2007). A heuristic journey of discovery: Exploring the positive influence of the natural environment on the human spirit. Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: The intention of this heuristic study was to explore and discover the essence of the positive influence of the natural environment on the human spirit. The study quest was identified as a central concern that evolved from the author's personal experience of spiritual awakening in the natural environment and an interest in the concept of connectedness in nursing care and practice. The study also focused on the self of the nurse and the qualities of holistic nursing care. Guided by heuristic methodology developed by Moustakas (1990) the thesis traces a journey of discovery. Using conversational interviews, six nurses were asked to describe their experiences of their spirit being positively influenced in the natural environment. These nurses were also asked if these beneficial experiences had any flow-on effect to their nursing practice. From these interviews various commonalities of experience were identified as well as some experiences unique to the individual participants. The participant knowing was articulated using Reed's (1992) dimensions of relatedness in spirituality as a framework. Reed describes these dimensions as being able to be experienced intrapersonally, interpersonally and transpersonally. A substantive body of nursing and non-nursing literature was explored to support the participant knowing and provide strength to the discussion. The study discovered that the human spirit is positively influenced in the natural environment. The three actions of personal healing and wellbeing in the natural environment, knowing self – knowing others and sustaining self in nursing practice were valued by the participants as contributing to the quality of their nursing care. In bringing together spirituality, the natural environment and nursing, holism was discovered to be the significant and connecting constituent. The study has some implications for the discipline of nursing that are also discussed by the author.
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Phillips, B. N. (2007). Nursing care and understanding the experiences of others: A Gadamerian perspective. Nursing Inquiry, 14(1), 89–94.
Abstract: This article investigates the process where nurses attempt to understand the experience of patients. The author argues that this transcends particular models of ill-health. Gadamerian hermeneutics, which has been used in nursing research to articulate the process of understanding, is elaborated on. Gadamer's exposition of understanding shows that practitioners need to be aware that understanding of other people is developed through a fusion of one's own history, language and culture with that of the other person. This occurs through a hermeneutic question-answer dialogue in which practitioners put their ideas at risk of being modified or rejected in the process. Understanding then, is a perceptual and conceptual process. In this way, the experience of nurses seeking to understanding those they nurse increases self-awareness, as well as enhancing their ability to further understand others.
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Jackson, H. (2001). Compassion: A concept exploration. Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 17(1), 16–23.
Abstract: This paper explores the nature of compassion and posits it as a moral virtue that requires the nurse to act in the presence of suffering. Compassion is defined in relation to suffering and reciprocity, and distinguished from sympathy and pity.
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Morrison, M. (2003). Posthuman pathology: A postmodern art project located in critical care. Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: The author's art project “Posthuman Pathology” is a postmodern examination of the resolutely modernist culture of critical care medicine. She uses conceptual art practices in conjunction with the techniques of anti-aesthetics in order to dismantle, open out and critique ideas which are foundational to the culture of critical care.
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Carter, T. (2000). The places we will go.
Abstract: The author examines how writing shapes her practice and how she nurses, her way of being and doing. She notes that “as human beings we cannot be broken into subsets, my personal and professional being inform each other, therefore you will find woven into the fabric of this paper my personal and professional becoming united by the dominant thread of nursing”. The paper is structured using the different phases of her career as a staff nurse, nurse practitioner and charge nurse. In each section she has linked the stories of children and young adults with reflections on her writing and how it has impacted her practice. She goes on to say that question and reflection are vital adjuncts to nurses' development as individual practitioners and to the profession. They facilitate journeying past the superficial into the deep of a relationship with patients and colleagues. She identifies a responsibility as nurses is to engage with the individual and help them find a space where they can regain a sense of hope and personal power. This paper follows the author's journey, leaving her with a clearer understanding of who she is and how she nurses.
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Tucakovic, M. (2001). Nursing as an aesthetic praxis. Ph.D. thesis, , .
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.
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Bavidge, D. (2006). Leadership: Further perspectives. Available online from Eastern Institute of Technology, 14(1), 20–22.
Abstract: This paper uses two perspectives, a feminist analysis and emancipatory leadership model, to analyse the practice and philosophy of leadership. It finds the important components of leadership include communicating understanding, developing a sense of community, and reconstituting the power relationships. This challenges traditional leadership perspectives which privilege individuals hierarchically appointed, or with deemed alienable qualities or traits.
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Neehoff, S. M. (1999). Pedagogical possibilities for nursing. Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: This thesis is about what the author terms the 'invisible bodies of nursing'. The physical body of the nurse, the body of practice, and the body of knowledge. The physical body of the nurse is absent in most nursing literature, it is sometimes inferred but seldom discussed. The contention is that the physical body of the nurse is invisible because it is tacit. Much nursing practice is invisible because it is perceived by many nurses to be inarticulable and is carried out within a private discourse of nursing, silently and secretly. Nursing knowledge is invisible because it is not seen as being valid or authoritative or sanctioned as a legitimate discourse by the dominant discourse. These issues are approach through an evolving 'specular' lens. Luce Irigaray's philosophy of the feminine and her deconstructing and reconstructing of psychoanalytic structures for women inform this work. Michel Foucault's genealogical approach to analysing discourses is utilized, along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Nursing's struggle for recognition is ongoing. The author discusses strategies that nurses could use to make themselves more 'visible' in healthcare structures. The exploration of the embodied self of the nurse and through this the embodied knowledge of nursing is nascent.
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Phillips, S. (1999). Exploration of the socio-cultural conditions and challenges which may impede nursing development in the twenty-first century and proactive strategies to counter these challenges.
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Adams, K. (2003). A postmodern/poststructural exploration of the discursive formation of professional nursing in New Zealand 1840 – 2000. Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: This study examines the discursive formation of professional nursing in one country, as revealed by the history of nursing in New Zealand. Michel Foucault's approach to historical research signifies a different level of analysis from conventional approaches, focusing not on the history of ideas but on an understanding of the present, a history of the present. A genealogical method derived from Foucauldian poststructuralism reveals how different understandings of nursing have occurred and have governed nursing practices and scholarship in different historical contexts. The archaeological investigation in this study reveals two moments of epistemic transformation, that is, two intervals of mutation and discontinuity. The Nightingale era in the 1880s precipitated the first epistemic shift – premodernism to modernism. The transfer of nursing education from hospital based training to the tertiary education sector, followed by the introduction of the baccalaureate degree, precipitated the second epistemic shift in the 1990s, the advent of postmodernism. Encompassing these two epistemes, six historical contexts are identified, where significant disruptions to the nursing discourses overturned previously held assumptions about what constituted a nurse. Each historical context is identified by specific discursive constructs. The first is colonial caring, the second the Nightingale ethos and the third heroic, disciplined obedience. In the fourth context, nursing is framed by, and within, discourses of skilled, humanistic caring, in the fifth, scientific, task focused managerialism, and in the 1990s, the sixth context, by multiple realities in an age of uncertainty.
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Hamilton, J. (2003). Personal power and the language of possibility: A study of opportunity and potential and its implications for nursing. Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: This study uses a critical approach to analyse influences connected to opportunities for nurses to have their unique contribution to the health system recognised, and identifies a plan of action. The stories as told by four Northland nurses, identified the underlying principle of self-knowledge which, when connected to core values emerged as personal power with the language of possibility. Other factors which enabled opportunity recognition were labelled as: knowing the self, integrating core values from personal and professional qualities, connecting these to an intuitive plan, trusting it because it is value-based, using that plan to form goals and achieve direction. Integrating core values into goal setting enabled people to make choices that would enhance as well as protect their personal development. This study has implications for nurses as they seek out places where they can work well and for health planners to design systems where this can happen.
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