Donna Frost

Chapter 5 142 actively facilitated by their employers, they did have a high degree of control over their own work diaries and could in most instances plan time to engage in inquiry activities. Some of the meetings and practice observations attracted continuing education credits needed for re-registration as nurse practitioners. As for the nurses in the RNI, the NPI members are happy for their full names to be used in this thesis. However, to protect the identities of organisations and individuals not in the inquiry group, pseudonyms chosen by the NPs themselves are used and the information about individual work settings is brief. Two of the NPs in the NPI were men and the rest women. The age of group members ranged from 31 to 52 years at the beginning of the NPI and experience as a NP ranged from two to eight years. Based in various inpatient and outpatient specialties, and in one case general practice, all the NPs worked in contexts where they were responsible for delivering integrated medical and nursing care to a well delineated group of patients. This meant that within their specific scope of practice each NP was responsible for performing a general and focused medical and nursing assessment including physical examination, ordering diagnostic tests where indicated, interpreting the results, coming to differential and working diagnoses, prescribing a treatment and nursing care plan and following this up. Each NP was part of a multidisciplinary team and worked closely with at least one general practitioner, medical specialist (consultant) or surgeon. They rarely delivered hands-on nursing care in the normal course of theirwork unless theywere involved in teaching or an emergency situation. Contact with patients generally occurred during consultations within general practice and outpatient settings, or during admission procedures, on ward rounds, following up ward rounds or when called to the ward in inpatient settings. Further information is given about each of the NP participants in Table 5 . 4 .