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Recent New Zealand reports have identified the nursing workforce for its potential to make a significant contribution to increased productivity in health services. The purpose of this paper is to review critically the recent and current labour approaches to improve nursing productivity in New Zealand, in a context of international research and experience.

An examination of government documents regarding productivity, and a review of New Zealand and international literature and research on nursing productivity and its measurement form the basis of the paper.

It is found that productivity improvement strategies are influenced by theories of labour economics and scientific management that conceptualise a nurse as a labour unit and a cost to the organisation. Nursing productivity rose significantly with the health reforms of the 1990s that reduced nursing input costs but impacts on patient safety and nurses were negative. Current approaches to increasing nursing productivity, including the “productive ward” and reconfiguration of nursing teams, also draw on manufacturing innovations. Emerging thinking considers productivity in the context of the work environment and changing professional roles, and proposes reconceptualising the nurse as an intellectual asset to knowledge‐intensive health organisations.

Strategies that take a systems approach to nursing productivity, that view nursing as a capital asset, that focus on the interface between nurse and working environment and measure patient and nurse outcomes are advocated.

The paper shows that reframing nursing productivity brings into focus management strategies to raise productivity while protecting nursing and patient outcomes.

Research supports the value of clinical supervision as an essential aspect of mental health nursing. Despite the need for this, there appears to be a deficit in qualified supervision in the mental health field, although efforts have been made toward advanced mental health practitioner nursing. This study aims to characterize the ideas that advanced mental health nurse practitioners hold about supervision in practice and to consider what is required to support changes to advanced mental health nursing in Saudi Arabia.

This study adopted a qualitative exploratory design that applied a phenomenological approach as the research method. Twelve postgraduate mental health nurses were recruited through purposive sampling.

The data analysis generated the central theme, which indicates the attributes of a competent supervisor of advanced mental health nurse practitioners. The components of a supervisor’s competence had the following three main themes: nursing competencies, professional characteristics and communication.

A limitation of this study is that the data was collected from practicing advanced care mental health practitioners in Saudi Arabia. Further research conducted in different geographical areas and with different categories of staff is warranted. The results of those studies could be compared against the results presented here.

Best practice measures indicated that mental health nurse practitioners working in mental health settings and private practice should receive supervision to help them reflect upon their daily nursing practice challenges.

The findings of this study indicate that to support mental health practitioners and advanced mental health practitioners working in private practice, competent supervisors need to be on hand and willing to invest in creating a supportive culture in practice.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

A study of the narratives of community mental health nurses, with an emphasis on education and training, identified education as offering a ‘stepping stone’ out of a profession that struggles for recognition and status. This paper describes those narratives and the challenges facing healthcare organisations seeking to assimilate and retain the talent of those who have achieved academic success. The authors suggest that encouraging an expertise that integrates academic and practice skills might be achieved through more widespread appointment of clinical professorships.

Multi‐skilling has been the most enduring element of patient‐focused care in the UK. A recent report from the Manchester University Health Service Management Unit (HSMU) extended the multi‐skilling debate and offered a framework for changing National Health Service workforce policy along multi‐skilling lines. Examines the main HSMU issues in the light of broader empirical and other evidence. Assesses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to multi‐skilling. Concludes that multi‐skilling protagonists still face a number of challenges.

This paper reports on a comparative qualitative study across four European countries which explored the formation of work identity amongst nurses and other professionals in the field of health care. Within this sector, it identifies trends towards a more flexible, more highly skilled and more mobile workforce. Conversely, however, it is becoming difficult to recruit and retain staff due to increasing workload, decreasing job satisfaction and comparatively low pay. Occupational identity is theorised as a multi‐dimensional phenomenon, with structural, social and individual‐psychological components. A number of emerging common themes across the three dimensions and across the four national settings include structural conflicts between cost efficiency and quality of care, and individual conflicts between the core activity of caring for patients and the increasing demands of administration and other peripheral work. The study identifies a number of strategies used by nurses to balance these conflicting demands. Overall, the professional identity of nurses remains strong, but it is important for policy makers to be aware of the potential negative effects, in terms of staff turnover, mobility and job (dis)satisfaction, of the current state of the health care sector.

The health-care services in Iraq currently face many challenges. The most noted is the lack of effective nursing leaders to meet the growing needs of the health-care services. Effective nursing leadership is critical to the health-care system, affecting work performance, quality of care and staff satisfaction. The literature suggests that nursing leaders in Iraq are not adequately trained to provide leadership to improve the nursing profession and have limited involvement in decision-making. The purpose of this study is to explore the views of nurses on what they believe constitutes effective leadership in Iraq.

A qualitative methods approach is used involving 20 semi-structured interviews of senior nurses. The sample of nurses came from two large general hospitals in Iraq. The qualitative data was thematically analyzed and interpreted.

The study results indicated that there were factors that influence the performance of nurse leader, namely, excessive workload, personal relationship with nursing staff, professional recognition of nursing and selection criteria of leaders. Test results show that there were significant differences in views of the nurses toward nurse leaders’ performance. This research concludes that the nurse leader performance in developing countries is affected by excessive workload, personal relationship with nursing staff, professional recognition of nursing and selection criteria of leaders.

The relevance of the study stems from the scarcity of research on the leader performance in developing countries, while studies on the factors influencing the innovative performance of leaders in nurses’ professional are significantly limited. This study is one of the earliest studies that investigate these factors influencing the nurse leader’s performance.

The experiences of clinical facilitators working within non-conventional mental health settings have not yet been explored. The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of clinical facilitators when facilitating nursing student learning within a non-conventional mental health clinical placement.

This study adopted a qualitative phenomenological approach. The participants in this study were five registered nurses who had facilitated students at a non-conventional mental health clinical placement called Recovery Camp. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted.

The facilitators experiences could be understood through two main themes: facilitator skills and opportunities for student learning. Recovery Camp allowed the facilitators to build on their own nursing and facilitation skills, while examining themselves as a mental health nurse. “Being with” students (immersive engagement) enabled opportunistic and rare learning moments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known study to explore the experiences of clinical facilitators working in a non-conventional mental health placement.

Health departments of Iran have attempted to encourage nursing staff to incorporate research findings into practice since 2005. Consequently, significant changes have occurred in nursing area including holding computer skills courses, digital library workshops, establishing web sites in hospitals, and developing information technology (IT) training in nursing students' curriculum to increase accessibility to best practice information and opportunity for nurses and students to use research-based information in their clinical decision. So a question has raised, what information resources are used by nursing staff and students in hospitals? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A total of 412 nurses and students working in hospitals connected to web and digital libraries participated. They are evaluated with a questionnaire.

The results indicated that the students and the nurses preferred experiential knowledge to research-based information in their clinical decisions and they had little tendency to high-level evidence. Results showed that lack of skill in using library was the most important deterrent in using research-based information.

It could be concluded that provision of the infrastructures for using research-based information in clinical decisions was not sufficient. In addition to infrastructures, the paper must invest on organizational, system-wide approaches such as organizational culture, information literacy culture, acceptance of innovation, role of clinical librarians and advanced nursing informatics, and social marketing in evidence-based practice to facilitate the use of higher-level evidence in practice.

For self-training of nursing students, this paper developed a mannequin to simulate and measure the movement of a patient’s arms while nurses changed the patient’s clothes on a bed. In addition, using the mannequin the purpose of this paper is to determine the difference in the handling of a patient’s arms between nursing teachers and students.

The target patient was an old man with complete paralysis. Three-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) shoulder joints and one-DOF elbow joints were applied to the mannequin. The angles of all joints were measured using a potentiometer, and those angles were transmitted to a computer via Bluetooth.

In a preliminary experiment, the two nursing teachers confirmed that the mannequin arms simulated the motion of the arms of a paralyzed patient. In the experiment, two teachers and six students changed the clothes of the mannequin. The average joint angle of the left elbow and the moving frequency of the left elbow, right shoulder adduction/abduction and right shoulder internal/external rotation were lower in the case of teachers dressing the mannequin than when students were dressing it.

The proposed system can simulate a completely paralyzed patient that nursing students would normally be almost unable to train with. Additionally, the proposed approach can reveal differences between skilled and non-skilled people in the treatment of a patient’s body.