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The aging of a population poses significant challenges to healthcare, housing, social security and elderly care services. Active aging is promoted by the Hong Kong government but is compromised by a shortage of nurses, doctors and professional aides. This study aims to review the history of nursing education in Hong Kong, evaluate Hong Kong's nursing manpower policy with a macro–micro analysis based on sociological imagination and provide sound recommendations.

This article analyzes the nursing shortage in Hong Kong. A comprehensive literature review was conducted, concerning the Hong Kong healthcare workforce and covering relevant government reports, consultation papers and articles from academic journals from 1943 to the present.

The nursing shortage in Hong Kong can be understood from both absolute and relative terms. The total number of practicing nurses and fresh graduates registering through the four aforementioned pathways increased from 17,034 in 1996 to 61,295 in 2020 (growth rate of 74.4%), but it is predicted that there will be a shortage of 455, 1,383 and 1,669 nurses in 2020, 2025 and 2030, respectively. Moreover, Hong Kong had 8.2 nurses per 1,000 people in 2020. Although this rate exceeds those of China, South Korea and Singapore, it lags behind those of the USA and Australia as well as the international recommendation of nine nurses per 1,000 people. The nurse shortage has been further aggravated by an interaction between macro factors, including aging population, a lack of coherent and long-term nursing manpower policy (an analysis is based on a health policy triangle), numerous obstacles imposed on nurses from abroad and micro factors emanating from an interplay of push–pull factors among nurses.

The proportion of the Hong Kong population aged 65 years or older was 18% in 2019. The availability of healthcare workers is essential for attaining optimal health outcomes for older adults. The high turnover rate of nurses in public hospitals negatively affects the provision of timely high-quality medical services in the dual-track medical system. Therefore, workforce projections should be made every three years. Such policy should rely primarily on local nurses trained both by University Grant Committee-funded institutions and by self-financed tertiary institutions. Foreign nurses should be a supplementary resource. The budget allocated to the public healthcare sector should be increased to improve remuneration, provide abundant training opportunities and improve working environment to retain nurses in public hospitals.

Given that deep-seated problems surrounding the quantity and quality of nurses, the avenues for pursuing nursing degree education and the turnover rate of nurses in public hospitals remain unsolved, it is imperative to investigate how to alleviate the healthcare workforce shortage in Hong Kong.

The study aims to investigate how and why hedges are used in nursing and education academic research articles and find out whether there are differences between the two disciplines in using hedges and their subcategories.

The realization of hedges in 50 academic articles representing both disciplines, namely education and nursing, was scrutinized and analyzed.

The study reveals that there are significant differences between the nursing and education writers' use of hedging in the total use of hedging devices and their subcategories, in favor of the education discipline. This indicates that writers of education articles use hedges more frequently than the writers of nursing articles. In support of previous literature, it concludes that hedging devices are used as communicative strategies to qualify writers' commitment, reduce the force of the researchers' statements, express probability, save the writers' face, persuade readers, and avoid any possible rejection of their statements.

The study was limited to 50 research articles representing both disciplines: education (non-scientific genre) and nursing (scientific genre), and certain hedging devices and their subcategories.

The study recommends that a clear awareness of the pragmatic effect of hedges and the ability to recognize them in texts is crucial to the acquisition of rhetorical competence in any discipline.

Despite the significance of hedging and the extensive research conducted on hedging, no studies have been conducted on nursing and education academic research articles to see how and why hedges are used in these two disciplines. The results can add to the existing literature that this rhetorical strategy is used differently in different disciplines and make an important contribution to the understanding of the practical reasoning and persuasion in nursing and education.

This paper reflects on changes to end-point assessment (EPA) brought about as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and considers how proposed future change will impact on training providers and employers of health apprentices.

The paper provides an analysis of apprenticeship policy, the role of EPA and consideration of assessment strategies used in higher education and health professions. Implications for policy, training providers and clinical practice are proposed.

These changes will bring the completion of EPA closer to education providers and allow them to take a more direct role within the process. Education providers will need to be issued with clear guidance to ensure regulatory compliance. The pedagogical value of EPA is questioned.

Training providers and policymakers will need to review their processes and guidance appropriately. This paper provides a summary of salient points needing consideration.

This article examines the similarities and differences in the professional and work organisation of nursing within two European countries: Italy and Germany. In principle both nursing systems could be expected to share much in common given they are both part of the European Community (EC). In practice the professional and work organisations are rather different. In Italy, the organised profession is currently being “promoted” from collegi to ordini, reflecting an upgrading of nurse education and training. Ordine (and collegi) are state‐sponsored mechanisms for professional registration, a system not to be found in Germany. Instead, German nurses through their professional organisations have been struggling to establish an autonomous role for themselves within the health service division of labour independent of the medical profession.

Concerns of nursing literature today reflect the aspirations and changing character of the profession as it seeks to:

The purpose of this paper is to assess the knowledge and practices of nursing staff caring for patients with dysphagia to determine any needs for further education programmes.

A self-administered questionnaire with close-ended questions was completed by nurses at a tertiary hospital in Saudi Arabia to measure the depth of their dysphagia knowledge.

From 316 potential participants, a sample of 174 nurses completed the questionnaire. The results revealed that the participants had partial theoretical and practical knowledge about nursing care for patients with dysphagia. Of interest, 78 per cent of the nurses reported that they had received less than 1 h of training in dysphagia, and only 4 per cent were aware of speech and language pathologists’ role in dysphagia management.

As the medical professionals who have the most contact with the patients, nurses have a central role in the care of patients with dysphagia. This study provides information that will guide strategies for in-service nurse education dysphagia programmes.

The estimated Saudi prevalence of dysphagia is high due to increased incidence of medical conditions commonly associated with dysphagia, such as stroke, cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injuries from traffic accidents. Nurses play a pivotal role in caring for these patients. However, little is known about the level of care patients with dysphagia require in Saudi hospital settings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion that social constructionist approaches to learning, which a building with the hands provides, is a “technique that leverages the potential of the hand-mind dynamic” as historically reported in the extant published literature.

The use of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) method in the context of transformative learning in Higher Education was used to drive a Situational analysis with sixteen postgraduate nursing students, from African learning contexts. This methodological approach was used to specifically explore their identity as learners and then to facilitate processes of critical introspection on social constructivist learning opportunities.

Students’ perceived LSP permitted a deeper level of critical introspection on their transformative learning journeys than alternative approaches, such as written discourse or extended narratives, could have provided. They also perceived that a major benefit of using the LSP method was that it enabled them to understand and articulate their stories more easily than if they verbally reported them first.

The sampling the authors used was purposive and reflective of the Nigerian background of our research participants, who study at the University of Sunderland.

LSP was perceived as an effective vehicle for the facilitation of reflection and self-awareness, which consequently contribute to students’ capacities to function at a metacognitive level. This has the potential to contribute to authentic transformative learning. Academic learning at postgraduate level hinged on the capacity of students to develop a pragmatic and working knowledge of what acknowledging their epistemic cognition entailed.

The methodological approach implemented in this paper provides a unique means of harnessing a now common gamification technique in pedagogic practice.

Research has suggested that employees interpret high-performance work systems (HPWSs) as targeting two distinct organizational objectives: enhancing performance and promoting employee well-being. These attributions often exert divergent effects on employee attitudes. Thus, this study aims to investigate this dynamic within the context of the Korean nursing occupation, clarifying how the HPWS can simultaneously evoke dual attributions: human resource (HR) well-being and HR performance attributions. Additionally, the authors examine the contrasting effects of these attributions and identify a moderating variable that could reconcile them. Drawing on the psychological experience of status theory, the authors conceptualize and test the moderating effect of employees' self-perceived status on the relationship between HR performance attribution and affective commitment.

Data were collected from 475 nurses in 82 work units in Korean hospitals. Hypotheses were tested in a multilevel moderated mediation model.

The findings revealed that an HPWS elicits HR well-being and HR performance attributions. While HR well-being attribution was positively associated with affective commitment, HR performance attribution was positively related to affective commitment when employees' self-perceived status was high. Moreover, the HPWS demonstrated an indirect relationship with affective commitment via increasing HR performance attribution when self-perceived status was high.

Although the personal meaning of HR attributions differs depending on the perceiver’s situation, this aspect has received little attention in the field of research. This study advances the understanding of HR attributions derived from the HPWS within the specific context of Korean nursing. Furthermore, the authors suggest that the two attributions may not conflict with each other, indicating that the impact of HR performance attribution is conditional on an individual’s self-perceived status.

Given that the relationship between proactive personality and turnover intention is not straightforward in the literature, the authors address two research questions focusing on the nursing profession: does proactive personality negatively influence nurses' turnover intention by alleviating their lack of professional recognition? And does a supervisor’s proactive personality act as a boundary condition for the mediating effects of the lack of professional recognition in the link between proactive personality and turnover intentions?

A moderated mediation model linking proactive personality and turnover intentions was developed and tested on a sample of 579 nurses in 88 work units in general hospitals in South Korea.

The results of multilevel path analysis reveal that proactive personality has a negative indirect relationship with turnover intention via lack of professional recognition. Additionally, the indirect relationship is strengthened when the supervisor’s proactive personality is low.

These findings provide valuable empirical evidence on the inconclusive relationship between proactive personality and turnover intention by highlighting the role of proactive personality in attenuating the influence of negative occupational factors. Moreover, proactive personality as a boundary condition for the aforementioned relationship was empirically examined.