To be without a home and live in public spaces or a rooming house is to experience chaos in one’s daily life with compromised food, medication, income, and physical security. This, in turn, leads to a compromised ability to foster and maintain linkages with mainstream health services. Health outcomes for homeless individuals in Australia are shocking, or at least they should be.

How do nurses work with people experiencing homelessness in Australia? What does person-centred care look like for a person who is homeless and for those who work with them? These are fundamental questions about nursing as skillful relational work in marginalised spaces with vulnerable people. Specialist nursing roles are relatively rare in these spaces.

Creative non-fiction is a reflexive writing approach that portrays the complexity and humanity of persons who are key subjects in the narrative. A community health nurse uses it in an ordinary day at work as she engages with “Lisa”, a young homeless woman, throughout a health intervention that doesn’t end when she is admitted to hospital. The broader social aspects integral to working with this marginalised group are included to support the narrative. Suggestions are made regarding future research into this complex area of nursing practice and health care.

Climate change poses significant threat to the wellbeing of global society. Addressing this change has as yet generated no fixed blueprint for social work practice and education. This paper reports on a formative evaluation of one Australian initiative to address this transformative opening in social work field education. Prompted by service users' and workers' experience of the impact of drought, a rurally located social work course team amended the field education curriculum to include a focus on Environment and Sustainability. This learning goal was added to the existing learning goals derived from the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) Practice Standards. Students and field supervisors were surveyed on their experience of meeting this new learning goal. While most expressed confidence in understanding the concepts involved, they clearly lacked assurance in interpreting these in practice encounters. Considering their qualitative input suggests that this topic is making a transition from being on the margins of social work to becoming mainstream. Their open-ended responses indicate that the incorporation of environmental sustainability into practice is at a threshold stage of development. Further enactment of eco-social work at the local level is concluded to be supported by using a transformative learning framework in facilitating critical reflection and collaborative dialogue for effective change.

Contemporary nursing in Australia and internationally is challenging, complex, dynamic and very rewarding. Many of our clients are older and sicker that they were a decade ago, often with complex health and psychosocial needs. This means that nurses today must be clinically competent, flexible and knowledgeable. They must have a broad and deep knowledge of Physiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology, epidemiology, therapeutics, culture, ethics and law, as well as an understanding of evidence-based practice. Today's nurses have many roles and functions - clinician, educator, manager, researcher, to name just a few. They must be highly skilled with the ability to problem solve and they must possess sophisticated critical thinking skills. They must be life-long learners and confident in the use of information and communication technology. Nurses must be able to communicate effectively, with their clients, with each other and with other members of the health care team. Above all, they must care for their patients in ways that signify respect, acceptance, empathy, connectedness, cultural sensitivity and genuine concern. Against this background, the first Australian edition of 'Kozier and Erb's fundamentals of nursing' will be of immense benefit to both beginning students and those who are more advanced. This comprehensive textbook, with its unique Australian perspective, introduces the reader to vitally important nursing issues, concepts, practices and theories. The book will prepare students for practice in a range of diverse clinical settings and help them understand what it means to be a competent professional nurse in the twenty-first century.

My three children died of unrelated causes in 1971, 1983, and 2005. This thesis is an autoethnography in which I reclaim my identity as a mother, change my gaze to my children's lives rather than their deaths and explore how the culture of the last four decades influenced my experience. As I research my life, I seek answers from the academic literature to create meaning from my experience. At the core of this research are three stories about mothering each child within the culture in which they lived and died. Although the generalizability of my experiences is problematic, I hope that my writing resonates with the experience of readers.

Background: Many people undergoing dialysis withdraw from dialysis for various reasons, and this withdrawal is one of the most common causes of death of dialysis patients in Hong Kong. However, care priorities and the decision-making process at end-of-life has not been emphasised. As Hong Kong is a multicultural society, culture has a role in the decision-making process of the study population. Limited studies have been conducted to explore the decision-making process of dialysis patients and their carers regarding end-of-life care, especially in the Hong Kong Chinese context; this study was performed to address this gap.
Purpose: The findings of this study may provide renal healthcare professionals with insights into the beliefs and expectations of patients and carers at the final stage of life. This study also aims to explore the effect of culture on communication about the decision-making process, to learn more about a previously hidden topic in Hong Kong.
Methods: A mixed methods sequential explanatory design was adopted and convenience sampling was used to recruit informants in a regional renal dialysis centre in Hong Kong. Quantitative descriptive data were gathered and analysed. The results were used to guide the formulation of the questions in the focus group interviews. The ethnonursing research method, based on Leininger's culture care theory, was adopted to guide the qualitative phase of the study.
Findings: Some 121 dialysis patients and 61 carers participated in this study. The dialysis patient informants considered communication barriers, Chinese cultural norms and dying in dignity the major themes in the decision-making process in their end-of-life domain; personalising care, normalising life, sharing burdens and the carer's plight were expressed as themes by the carer informants. The universalities and diversities of the findings were used to formulate a model: the overarching influence of culture in the decision-making process of dialysis patients and carers at end-of-life. This model illustrates the interrelated effects of communication barriers, family dynamics, sharing burdens and existential distress on the core of 'dignified dying'.
Conclusions: It should be acknowledged that in the context of Hong Kong dialysis patients and carers always experience tensions and struggles in the decision-making process in shifting between Eastern and Western cultures. Decision outcomes are perceived as individualised, situational and contextual, with culture playing a central influence. Enhancing communication channels, facilitating shared decision-making and promoting advance care planning are crucial for end-of-life care. Importantly, every dialysis patient should leave the world in a dignified manner (dignified dying).

Writing the stories of the lives of my three children who died of unrelated causes had unexpected consequences. I found myself released from exile. I had long felt banished from the world of mothering. This is an autoethnography on mothering Toni, my first-born child. She died in 1983 aged 13 years, 4 years after a diagnosis of leukaemia. The key to reclaiming my mother-love for Toni was to peel away the armour and expose my ambivalence about mothering. My ambivalence included the harrowing roller coaster ride of high anxiety, deep resentment and the pure ecstasy of mother love. My ambivalence, heightened by the years of Toni's illness, included my secret thoughts of wishing it was all over. Mortified by my 'bad' thoughts, I find my freedom by researching my and Toni's life and the motherhood literature to reach an acceptance of my past. I have a renewed sense of my mothering self.

Aim: This paper profiles a study that explored nursing students' information and communication technology competence and confidence. It presents selected findings that focus on students' attitudes towards information and communication technology as an educational methodology and their perceptions of its relevance to clinical practice. Background: Information and communication technology is integral to contemporary nursing practice. Development of these skills is important to ensure that graduates are 'work ready' and adequately prepared to practice in increasingly technological healthcare environments. Methods: This was a mixed methods study. Students (n = 971) from three Australian universities were surveyed using an instrument designed specifically for the study, and 24 students participated in focus groups. Findings: The focus group data revealed that a number of students were resistant to the use of information and communication technology as an educational methodology and lacked the requisite skills and confidence to engage successfully with this educational approach. Survey results indicated that 26 per cent of students were unsure about the relevance of information and communication technology to clinical practice and only 50 per cent felt 'very confident' using a computer. Conclusion: While the importance of information and communication technology to student's learning and to their preparedness for practice has been established, it is evident that students' motivation is influenced by their level of confidence and competence, and their understanding of the relevance of information and communication technology to their future careers.