To be or not to be? A caregiver's question: the lived experience of a stroke family during the first 18 months poststroke.

Background: Disability following a stroke often requires family, commonly a spouse, to provide care enabling the stroke survivor to return home. Immediate or extended family and friends may help provide direct care or support the primary caregiver. While family members share the common stroke experience, this is lived within the context of separate lives.

"It's just so bloody hard": recommendations for improving health interventions and maternity support services for disabled women.

Purpose: Little is known about the barriers and facilitators to pregnancy, birth and motherhood for disabled women within the New Zealand context. Our study explored this deficit with the aim of improving health care interventions and support for disabled mothers.

Methods: This paper reports on the third phase of a mixed-methods study.

New Zealand consumers' health information needs: results of an interpretive descriptive study.

Introduction: Health literacy is linked to better health outcomes and underpins effective self-management, yet over one-and-a-half million New Zealanders are known to have poor health literacy skills. An ability to access and understand health information is an important component of health literacy. Little is known, however, about New Zealand consumers' health information needs.

Making research real: embedding a longitudinal study in a taught research course for undergraduate nursing students.

Learning how and why scholarly research underpins and informs professional nursing practice is a continual challenge for undergraduate nursing students. They find the language and methods of research to be unfamiliar and unsettling. The work of educators thus becomes the process of breaking down barriers to students' understanding of research processes and application.

The experiences of women (65-74 years) living with a long-term condition in the shadow of ageing.

Aims: This paper reports on a study that explored experiences of women (65-74 years) as they grow older while living with a long-term condition. The phenomenon of focus was 'ageing with a long-term condition', rather than the experience of developing a long-term condition after reaching older adulthood.

Background: People with long-term conditions are living into older age.

The feasibility of assessing the Flinders Program™ of patient self-management in New Zealand primary care settings.

Introduction: The Flinders Program™ has been adopted in New Zealand as a useful and appropriate approach for self-management with primary care clients who have chronic conditions. The Flinders Program™ has not been evaluated in New Zealand settings.

Aim: To assess the feasibility of undertaking a substantive long-term trial to gauge the effectiveness of primary care nurses using the Flinders Program™ to improve health outcomes for New Zealand populations.

The Flinders Program™ of chronic condition self-management in New Zealand: survey findings.

Introduction: The Flinders Program™ of Chronic Condition Self-Management in New Zealand (NZ) has been given focus as a useful and appropriate approach for self-management support and improvement of long-term condition management.

Aim: To determine the use of the Flinders Program™ in NZ and identify barriers and enablers to its use.

Method: A web-based survey was undertaken in June 2009 with 355 eligible participants of the 500 who had completed 'Flinders' training in NZ since 2005.

Women's experience of ageing with a chronic condition.

Aim: This paper is a report of a study to explore the experiences of 'almost old' women as they grow older while living with a chronic condition.

Background: Little is known about the contextual effects of ageing and how it shapes and is shaped by a woman's chronic illness experience. Nurses' understanding of this phenomenon can have positive effects on how their client accesses and responds to healthcare.