The aim of this article is to argue for the need for a context-sensitive approach to the understanding of ethical issues in nursing practice as we face the next millennium. This approach means that the idea of universalism must be questioned because ethics is an interpersonal activity, set in a specific context. This view is based on issues that arise in international collaborative research as well as in research focused on ethical problems in nursing practice. Moral values are indigenous to (...) a particular culture and influence beliefs about health and illness as well as what priorities are to be made in providing health care. Nursing practice must include thoughtful reflection on the meaning of moral concepts and principles in terms of culture. Theoretical developments in nursing ethics must be based on empirical research focusing on contextual aspects of health care. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical commentary on the essentialist concept of ethnicity, which, it is argued, underpins the discourse of transcultural health‐care. Following a consideration of the difficulties that ensue from the way in which ethnicity has been theorised within transcultural nursing in particular, the paper turns to a consideration of alternative ways of thinking about ethnicity, which have emerged from more recent social anthropology and postmodernism. It addresses the question of how to therorise ethnicity in a way that does (...) not entail its reification as a set of fixed cultural properties, and makes some tentative suggestions for the possibility of a critical culturalist approach to difference and healthcare practice, which must include a consideration of racisms. (shrink)

The globalisation of the nursing workforce: barriers confronting overseas qualified nurses in AustraliaRecent decades have coincided with the rapid globalisation of the nursing profession. Within Australia there has been rising dependence on overseas qualified nurses (OQNs) to compensate for chronic nurse shortages related to the continued exodus of Australian nurses overseas and to emerging opportunities in other professions. Between 1983/4 and 1994/5, 30 544 OQNs entered Australia on either a permanent or temporary basis, counter‐balancing the departure overseas of 23 613 (...) locally trained and 6519 migrant nurses (producing a net gain of just 412 nurses in all). The period 1995/6–1999/2000 saw an additional 11 757 permanent or long‐term OQN arrivals, with nursing currently ranked third target profession in Australia’s skill migration program, in the context of continuing attrition among local nurses. This pattern of reliance on OQNs is a phenomenon simultaneously occurring in the UK, the US, Canada and the Middle East — the globalisation of nursing reflecting not merely Western demand but the growing agency and participation of women in skilled migration, their desire for improved quality of life, enhanced professional opportunity and remuneration, family reunion and adventure. (shrink)