Abstract: Identifies how traditional nursing practice in Maori communities may be enhanced. Highlights the need for nursing to broaden concepts of health, community, and public health nursing, to focus on issues of capacity-building, community needs, and a broader understanding of the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of the communities primary health-care nurses serve. Explores how health is experienced by Maori women during in-depth interviews using critical ethnographic method, underpinned by a Maori-centred approach. Articulates a model of health that is a dynamic process based on the restoration and maintenance of cultural integrity, derived from the principle of self-determination.

Abstract: Draws on a conversation between Wood and Adams, both tauiwi (non-Maori) academics, exploring challenges, innovations, and paradigms of care at a time in NZ history when colonising processes had already affected Maori. Traces the origins of rural, district and Plunket nursing. Provides insight into the structure and content of the book, its value in recording the history, proactive leadership, and practice of modern nursing as instigated by the British nursing diaspora.