The core role of the nurse practitioner: practice, professionalism and clinical leadership.

AIM: To draw on empirical evidence to illustrate the core role of nurse practitioners in Australia and New Zealand. BACKGROUND: Enacted legislation provides for mutual recognition of qualifications, including nursing, between New Zealand and Australia. As the nurse practitioner role is relatively new in both countries, there is no consistency in role expectation and hence mutual recognition has not yet been applied to nurse practitioners. A study jointly commissioned by both countries' Regulatory Boards developed information on the core role of the nurse practitioner, to develop shared competency and educational standards. Reporting on this study's process and outcomes provides insights that are relevant both locally and internationally. METHOD: This interpretive study used multiple data sources, including published and grey literature, policy documents, nurse practitioner program curricula and interviews with 15 nurse practitioners from the two countries. Data were analysed according to the appropriate standard for each data type and included both deductive and inductive methods. The data were aggregated thematically according to patterns within and across the interview and material data. FINDINGS: The core role of the nurse practitioner was identified as having three components: dynamic practice, professional efficacy and clinical leadership. Nurse practitioner practice is dynamic and involves the application of high level clinical knowledge and skills in a wide range of contexts. The nurse practitioner demonstrates professional efficacy, enhanced by an extended range of autonomy that includes legislated privileges. The nurse practitioner is a clinical leader with a readiness and an obligation to advocate for their client base and their profession at the systems level of health care. CONCLUSION: A clearly articulated and research informed description of the core role of the nurse practitioner provides the basis for development of educational and practice competency standards. These research findings provide new perspectives to inform the international debate about this extended level of nursing practice. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The findings from this research have the potential to achieve a standardised approach and internationally consistent nomenclature for the nurse practitioner role.

Generic one round group key exchange in the standard model

Minimizing complexity of group key exchange (GKE) protocols is an important milestone towards their practical deployment. An interesting approach to achieve this goal is to simplify the design of GKE protocols by using generic building blocks. In this paper we investigate the possibility of founding GKE protocols based on a primitive called multi key encapsulation mechanism (mKEM) and describe advantages and limitations of this approach. In particular, we show how to design a one-round GKE protocol which satisfies the classical requirement of authenticated key exchange (AKE) security, yet without forward secrecy. As a result, we obtain the first one-round GKE protocol secure in the standard model. We also conduct our analysis using recent formal models that take into account both outsider and insider attacks as well as the notion of key compromise impersonation resilience (KCIR). In contrast to previous models we show how to model both outsider and insider KCIR within the definition of mutual authentication. Our analysis additionally implies that the insider security compiler by Katz and Shin from ACM CCS 2005 can be used to achieve more than what is shown in the original work, namely both outsider and insider KCIR.

Efficient certificateless KEM in the standard model

We give a direct construction of a certificateless key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) in the standard model that is more efficient than the generic constructions proposed before by Huang and Wong \cite{DBLP:conf/acisp/HuangW07}. We use a direct construction from Kiltz and Galindo's KEM scheme \cite{DBLP:conf/acisp/KiltzG06} to obtain a certificateless KEM in the standard model; our construction is roughly twice as efficient as the generic construction. We also address the security flaw discovered by Selvi et al. \cite{cryptoeprint:2009:462}.

Certificateless key agreement in the standard model

We show how to construct a certificateless key agreement protocol from the certificateless key encapsulation mechanism introduced by \cite{lippold-ICISC_2009} in ICISC 2009 using the \cite{DBLP:conf/acisp/BoydCNP08} protocol from ACISP 2008. We introduce the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) model for certificateless cryptography, give security notions for Type I and Type II adversaries in the CK model, and highlight the differences to the existing e$^2$CK model discussed by \cite{DBLP:conf/pairing/LippoldBN09}. The resulting CK model is more relaxed thus giving more power to the adversary than the original CK model.

Educational Development in Australasia : 2010 Benchmarking Survey

In 2010, the third bi‐annual ADAPE Australasian benchmarking study was conducted to track educational development in Australia and New Zealand. Invitations to participate were sent to ADAPE’s membership of 820. Non‐members were also welcome to participate. In total, 92% of the 250 survey respondents were members of ADAPE. The 2010 Benchmarking Survey supports and extends results from 2005 and 2008. The 2010 survey was developed by taking into account participant feedback from 2008. With a view to provide the key information that participants want to know, the 2010 survey included more questions about salaries and other employment conditions; marketing and communications, especially new electronic technologies; and major gifts.

Investigating international accounting standard setting : the black box of IFRS 6

This paper examines the role of powerful entities and coalitions in shaping international accounting standards. Specifically, the focus is on the process by which the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) developed IFRS 6, Exploration for and Evaluation of Mineral Resources. In its Issues Paper, the IASB recommended that the successful efforts method be mandated for pre-production costs, eliminating the choice previously available between full cost and successful efforts methods. In spite of the endorsement of this view by a majority of the constituents who responded to the Issues Paper, the final outcome changed nothing, with choice being retained. A compelling explanation of this disparity between the visible inputs and outputs of the standard setting process is the existence of a “black box”, in which powerful extractive industries entities and coalitions covertly influenced the IASB to secure their own ends and ensure that the status quo was maintained