Book Review
Issues in Australian nursing 4
Genevieve Gray and Rosalie Pratt
ISBN: 0 442 050554; 1995; 462 pages; Churchill Livingstone Melbourne;
Margaret Dunlop
Griffith University
It is always difficult to review a disparate collection of readings, grouped though they may be into four themes; the regulation of nursing, the contemporary context, nursing and Australia's indigenous people, and the nurse as manager. The contemporary context theme covers the rather mixed bag of migrant nurses, the mentally ill and male nurses! As the series has developed (this is the fourth) it has become more organised around themes, but is still something of a smorgasbord from which each reader makes their selection.
This approach ensures that there is something to appeal to everyone in a broad nursing readership. The series has thus been found particularly useful at undergraduate level. It is high time for NESB and indigenous Australian issues to be placed squarely on the agenda and Issues 4 does this. The scant material previously available has now been well supplemented, particularly with respect to indigenous Australians. Laurel McArthy's moving account of being an aboriginal nurse deserves to be widely read and its lessons taken to heart.
Jill Teschendorff's article on FilipinO nurses deserves a wide readership for its specific insights into the sort of cultural conflicts experienced by migrant nurses. I found the section on the regulation of nursing rather disappointing in its lack of historico-political depth, although it was good to see some critico-analytic treatment of the competency fetish emerging. But this group of articles works predominantly within the dominant political structure of standards, competencies, legal and ethical codes. Within the limits of this high modern profeSSional agenda, they are a useful set of articles, as are the set on the nurse as manager.
Issues in Australian Nursing 4, like its predecessors, provides an interesting range of material of varying quality and interest. It continues to earn its place on undergraduate reading lists.
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