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

The other day I came across a photo of my then four-year-old son soaking in a bath trying to ease the itching from his chicken pox. 

I’ve been privileged in this edition to be able to speak with nurses at opposite ends of their nursing careers.

Interviewing Caz Hales (the bariatrics nurse researcher on p. 8) has got me thinking about fattism. She has been asking health professionals to don a ‘fat’ simulation suit and head out to a café and experience what it is like being very fat in a society that tends to celebrate the thin and judge the fat.

I have to confess until relatively recently my knowledge of Florence Nightingale was limited to the stereotypical ‘Lady of the Lamp’ watching selflessly over the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War.

One of the articles in this edition quotes that oft-shared airline safety advice to “put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others”.

Welcome to the digital summer edition of Nursing Review. We are ending the year with this special edition offering a smorgasbord of summer reading – a well-balanced ‘diet’ of articles new and old that run the gamut from informative to thought-provoking and useful to entertaining. 

It was winter 2009. My husband and son set off to work and school in fine fettle and returned with identical hacking coughs and raging temperatures. Working from home often has its advantages but it was a mixed blessing finding myself juggling a deadline and caring for two likely swine flu cases.

If I’ve learned anything from reporting on nursing over the years, it’s that many nurses are multitaskers extraordinaire. They juggle demanding workloads: raising kids and completing postgraduate study; and emerge with new skills to enhance their nursing practice and the letters PGDip, MN or even PhD after their names.

In this issue, my decision to write about electronic cigarettes came from the most personal of motives: someone I care for very much is a smoker. It’s likely that every non-smoker has one, two, or half-a-dozen or so smokers they care about as the last census showed that there are 463,000 adult smokers in New Zealand.

One small silver lining… Had a good boogie lately? When did you last get caught up in the moment? Tried something a little different lately? When did you last really catch up?

One of my first reporting tasks for Nursing Review was photographing striking Christchurch nurses in early 2002 – I recall my toddler son waving at them from his buggy.

The word ‘advocate’ is sprinkled across both New Zealand nursing’s Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics.

It is essential that nurses and world leaders focus on the global nursing workforce as a key priority for achieving better health for all. So states the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in its latest manifesto for International Nurses Day.

You can’t tell at a glance whether somebody walks to work every day, swims three times a week, or is a keen tramper – nor whether they live on coffee and adrenalin or three healthy balanced meals a day. But at first glance we’ll, often subconsciously, make a judgment on whether somebody is ‘skinny’, ‘fat’, or some nebulous ‘in-between’ using our own scale of whether someone has an ‘unhealthy’ (or unfashionable) physique.

The end of the year has swung around very fast.

Vulnerability is a common thread through many articles in Nursing Review this edition.

Nurses and journalists – chalk and cheese?

Winter ‘flu season looms

Closing the gaps

Now we can all get some sleep…

Communication – one of the 6Cs

Respect, trust, partnership and integrity: these four values underpin nursing’s new Code of Conduct, which we profile in our Learning & Leading edition.

Florence’s evidence ethos lives on

Nursing Review begins 2012 with a new look print edition with a focus on kick- starting a healthy year. Our focus section includes research, comment and advice on helping nurses take care of their own health and not just others.