Jane Mills

Dewey first described reflective thought as a way to solve issues of perplexity in his seminal work How We Think. Dewey’s work underpinned Strauss’ contribution to The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Grounded theory methods are characterised by memo writing. This paper will describe how memos, in the form of slides, were employed to demonstrate advanced skill acquisition in practice by an immigrant nurse and health visitor to a panel convened by the New Zealand Nursing Council. Globalisation and migration of the nursing workforce contributes to advancement of the nursing profession in some countries. New Zealand, whose critical mass of primary health care nursing leaders is small, with no specific postgraduate primary health care qualification, benefit from the transferable skills of migrant nurse and community practitioners. Finding easier ways to demonstrate advanced practice to New Zealand’s Nursing Council would maximise the potential contribution of immigrant nurses.

A requirement of many nurses in the process of licensing for practice each year is a declaration of continuing competence to practice. In Australia, each state and territory currently has its own regulatory authority for nurses and midwives, whose main role is to protect public safety. Like many other registering authorities in the Asia-Pacific region, Australian regulatory authorities undertake the random auditing of nurses and midwives in order to assess their competence to practice. Professional portfolios commonly are considered to be a tool that nurses can use to demonstrate to regulatory authorities, employers, and others how they meet the required competencies. This article examines the different types of portfolios that fall under the umbrella term, professional portfolio, and recommends that nurses explore the strategies that identify evidence of their continuing competence to practice for inclusion in such a document.

In Australia, the number of practice nurses is growing at a rapid rate. On the nursing landscape, this group of nurses stand out because of their relationship with the Australian Government who both fund them, and concern themselves with their continuing professional development. This paper provides a construction of the social world of Australian practice nurses, identifying stakeholders in the business of practice nursing. Literature produced by the various social world segments is analysed for the influence of medical dominance on the role, image, power and politics of practice nurses.

There is a substantial number of Iranian war veterans, exposed to sulfur mustard, who suffer from serious long term progressive health problems involving their respiratory organs, eyes, and skin. Little is known, however, about these casualties’ experiences of living with the consequences of sulfur mustard poisoning. This qualitative study aims to provide greater insight into how war veterans live with the consequences of the poisoning and involved 17 Iranian war veterans who had been poisoned by sulfur mustard during the Iran–Iraq conflict. Each participant was interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule and the data generated through this process was analyzed using constant comparative data analysis technique. Data analysis resulted in “religious beliefs and practices” as a main category, which included two sub-categories: religious value centered life and religious support. Findings suggest that religious belief assists veterans to accept the impact of poisoning on their lives and adapt their lifestyles accordingly, to participate in religious social activities and feel socially supported, and to be hopeful about the future and live their lives as fully as possible.

Mentoring in rural and remote nursing receives little attention in the literature, even though it is emerging in Australia as a popular strategy to improve the retention of staff. The Association for Australian Rural Nurses established a 2-year Mentor Development and Support Project in 2003 with the aim of promoting mentoring among rural and remote nurses. During the life of the project, 101 such nurses attended Mentor Development Workshops. This project demonstrated that training is an important prerequisite for rural and remote nurses who are planning to enter a mentoring relationship. Participant evaluation showed an increase in mentoring knowledge and skills and a subsequent rise in confidence about undertaking the role. Participants also believed that their increased capacity to mentor was reflected in their workplaces, contributing to a positive culture of learning.

Mentoring, the alliance of two people with varying degrees of experience in order to create opportunities for support and learning, is being encouraged as a response to current workforce issues in Australian rural nursing. The nursing profession is beginning to recognise the benefits of mentorship in providing psychosocial support and role acquisition skills to novice practitioners. These outcomes are valuable for enhancing the recruitment and retention of staff.The Mentor Development and Support Project of The Association for Australian Rural Nurses (AARN), established in 2003, was a strategy for increasing mentoring in the rural nursing workforce. This project aimed to develop the capacity of rural nurses to mentor effectively, as well as provide support for them for the duration of the mentoring partnership.This article reports on aspects of the AARN project. It includes a discussion of the need for planned mentor development opportunities and provides the rationale for the curriculum content of project workshops. It also includes evaluated outcomes for participants in the project.

Title. Grounded theory: a methodological spiral from positivism to postmodernismAim.  Our aim in this paper is to explain a methodological/methods package devised to incorporate situational and social world mapping with frame analysis, based on a grounded theory study of Australian rural nurses’ experiences of mentoring.Background.  Situational analysis, as conceived by Adele Clarke, shifts the research methodology of grounded theory from being located within a postpositivist paradigm to a postmodern paradigm. Clarke uses three types of maps during this process: situational, social world and positional, in combination with discourse analysis.Method.  During our grounded theory study, the process of concurrent interview data generation and analysis incorporated situational and social world mapping techniques. An outcome of this was our increased awareness of how outside actors influenced participants in their constructions of mentoring.In our attempts to use Clarke's methodological package, however, it became apparent that our constructivist beliefs about human agency could not be reconciled with the postmodern project of discourse analysis. We then turned to the literature on symbolic interactionism and adopted frame analysis as a method to examine the literature on rural nursing and mentoring as secondary form of data.Findings.  While we found situational and social world mapping very useful, we were less successful in using positional maps. In retrospect, we would argue that collective action framing provides an alternative to analysing such positions in the literature. This is particularly so for researchers who locate themselves within a constructivist paradigm, and who are therefore unwilling to reject the notion of human agency and the ability of individuals to shape their world in some way.Conclusion.  Our example of using this package of situational and social worlds mapping with frame analysis is intended to assist other researchers to locate participants more transparently in the social worlds that they negotiate in their everyday practice.

Mentoring is often proposed as a solution to the problem of successfully recruiting and retaining nursing staff. The aim of this constructivist grounded theory study was to explore Australian rural nurses’ experiences of mentoring.The research design used was reflexive in nature resulting in a substantive, constructivist grounded theory study.A national advertising campaign and snowball sampling were used to recruit nine participants from across Australia. Participants were rural nurses who had experience in mentoring others.Standard grounded theory methods of theoretical sampling, concurrent data collection and analysis using open, axial and theoretical coding and a story line technique to develop the core category and category saturation were used. To cultivate the reflexivity required of a constructivist study, we also incorporated reflective memoing, situational analysis mapping techniques and frame analysis. Data was generated through eleven interviews, email dialogue and shared situational mapping.Cultivating and growing new or novice rural nurses using supportive relationships such as mentoring was found to be an existing, integral part of experienced rural nurses’ practice, motivated by living and working in the same communities. Getting to know a stranger is the first part of the process of cultivating and growing another. New or novice rural nurses gain the attention of experienced rural nurses through showing potential or experiencing a critical incidence.The problem of retaining nurses is a global issue. Experienced nurses engaged in clinical practice have the potential to cultivate and grow new or novice nurses—many already do so. Recognising this role and providing opportunities for development will help grow a positive, supportive work environment that nurtures the experienced nurses of tomorrow.

Aim and background  Globally, nursing workforce shortages are a hot topic for discussion among politicians, academics and clinicians. This paper uses collective action framing to analyse the literature about the problem of workforce for Australian rural nurses.Evaluation  As part of a larger constructivist grounded theory study, we utilize collective action framing to bridge social world mapping and the literature. Data sources included journal databases, newspapers, newsletters and websites. We limited the years searched from 2000 to 2005. This analytical heuristic categorizes text into three main categories: diagnoses of a problem, postulations of solutions and actions to motivate change.Key issues  Having mapped the social world of Australian rural nurses as comprising four groups of collective actors – community, advocates, academics and government – we trace the texts that they have produced with a focus on mentoring as a potential solution to the problem of workforce.Conclusions  Mentoring entered the literature about the problem of workforce for Australian rural nurses because of a combination of political and academic will. These collective groups are now changing how they are framing the problem of workforce to focus instead on the globalization of nursing workforce shortages, which is resulting in diminished support for mentoring activities in clinical practice.

Title. Live my work: rural nurses and their multiple perspectives of selfAim.  This paper is a report of a study to explore rural nurses’ experiences of mentoring.Background.  Mentoring has recently been proposed by governments, advocates and academics as a solution to the problem for retaining rural nurses in the Australian workforce. Action in the form of mentor development workshops has changed the way that some rural nurses now construct supportive relationships as mentoring.Method.  A grounded theory design was used with nine rural nurses. Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted in various states of Australia during 2004–2005. Situational analysis mapping techniques and frame analysis were used in combination with concurrent data generation and analysis and theoretical sampling.Findings.  Experienced rural nurses cultivate novices through supportive mentoring relationships. The impetus for such relationships comes from their own histories of living and working in the same community, and this was termed ‘live my work’. Rural nurses use multiple perspectives of self in order to manage their interactions with others in their roles as community members, consumers of healthcare services and nurses. Personal strategies adapted to local context constitute the skills that experienced rural nurses pass-on to neophyte rural nurses through mentoring, while at the same time protecting them through troubleshooting and translating local cultural norms.Conclusion.  Living and working in the same community creates a set of complex challenges for novice rural nurses that are better faced with a mentor in place. Thus, mentoring has become an integral part of experienced rural nurses’ practice to promote staff retention.

Grounded theory is well utilised in qualitative research for building theoretical understanding of complex social processes. Grounded theory data analysis strategies can be used with different types of data, including secondary data. Despite the potential advantages of secondary data, it is rarely used for grounded theory studies, largely due to a perception that researchers are unable to follow the guidelines of this research design with data that they themselves have not collected. This paper demonstrates the use of secondary data in a study investigating the substantive area of Indigenous empowerment. Potential pitfalls and advantages of using grounded theory methods to analyse secondary data are discussed, as well as factors that facilitated the analytic process in this study. These factors included having a large data set across multiple sites and the use of literature as a source of data. The findings provide a valuable model for combining research and practise.