Welcome to the 2011 newsletter of the Graduate e-cohort study. We now have more than 450 graduates participating in our research and as all of our research partners are currently in the process of recruiting, our numbers continue to grow daily. This year as well as Canada, New Zealand and Australia, respondents from University College, Dublin in Ireland will join our study.

We now have three cohorts of graduates - representing recruitments from 2009, 2010 and 2011 - participating in our important research and we thank each and every one of you for your enthusiasm and support. As you know, ours is a longitudinal study examining the workforce choices of graduate nurses and midwives you in their first years of practice and the results will be used to inform industry and government to better understand the needs of our graduate workforce into the future. So by taking part in the Graduate e-cohort study you are helping to make a difference to your profession from the moment you graduate through your participation in valuable international research.

A paper reporting the data of the baseline survey of the 2009 New Zealand and Australian cohort of nurses is currently under review. Please keep returning to the Publications link on our Graduate e-cohort website where it will be posted along with other papers once they are published.

Who was Nurse Edith Cavell ?

During World War I Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians, along with other members of the British Empire, were shocked to learn of the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell in 1915. Nurse Cavell, given the responsibility of introducing nurse training in Belgium, was working as the Matron in a Red Cross hospital when she was arrested for assisting hundreds of allied servicemen to escape from the Germans. At the age of 49 years she was tried, found guilty of spying and shot by a German firing squad. When the news of her death was released, she was immediately elevated to the status of martyr within the British Empire. Enlistment for the armed forces doubled as men joined up to avenge her death.

Nurse Cavell was memorialised uniformly across the Commonwealth. Here in Australia the office of the Graduate e-cohort study is located in the Edith Cavell Building, a nurses’ home opened in 1922 on the campus of the then Brisbane Hospital. In Canada the Edith Cavell Memorial Nurses’ Residence was dedicated at Toronto Western Hospital in 1926. Today it serves refurbished as the Edith Cavell Wing of the hospital but now houses orthopaedics and rheumatology. New Zealand named four nursing rest homes for the elderly after the English nurse but most no longer exist. They also have an Edith Cavell bridge (left) while Canada named a mountain after her (below right). In many cities and towns across the three countries, street names bear the name ‘Edith’ or ‘Cavell’ and it was common for hospital wards to have a photo or bust of her displayed in the years immediately after the war. In Melbourne’s Domain, a bust of the English nurse became the site of commemorative services for ex-army nurses after its dedication in 1926. However, unlike Australia and Canada, few memorials to her appeared in New Zealand. Her sacrifice as overshadowed by the local loss of ten members of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service when the ship Marquette was torpedoed and sunk by the Germans not long after Cavell's execution.

After the war Cavell’s body was disinterred from Belgium and returned to England with full military and naval honours. She was afforded a hero’s funeral at Westminster Abbey before being buried near her home in Norwich. Edith Cavell remained a role model for Commonwealth women into the first half of the twentieth century. However, nearly a century later in a post-colonial age, her memory has faded and many people today are unfamiliar with her or her remarkable story of duty and heroism.

Pickles, K. (2007). Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration if Edith Cavell. Houndmills: Palgrave: Macmillan.

Introducing Dr Stephen Neville, Principle Investigator: Graduate e-cohort Study

Stephen lives in New Zealand and works at Massey University. He was born and spent the majority of his life in Christchurch where he lived in Sumner which, along with the other eastern suburbs of Christchurch, was severely damaged as a result of the February earthquake.

Stephen started his nursing career as a school leaver and has remained in nursing since, working in a variety of clinical areas such as with people who live with intellectual disabilities, acute care and older persons’ health (Assessment, Treatment and Rehabilitation as well as Aged Related Residential Care). He moved into nursing education in the late 1980s and was fortunate enough to work in one of the first Bachelor of Nursing programs offered in New Zealand.

Stephen has worked at Massey University since 2002 and is currently the Postgraduate Program Coordinator for nursing, a position he really enjoys. He currently teaches in the postgraduate program including older persons’ health and research methods as well as into the clinical papers leading to nurse prescribing. He also supervise research reports and Masters and Doctoral scholars. His area of research and publication is health workforce development and marginalised populations.

Stephen enjoys being part of two international workforce projects and working with our research partners. He states that the "Graduate e-cohort Study is building momentum and we are gathering a significant amount of data that will be useful to inform policy and practice particularly related to identifying workforce patterns as well as assisting with workforce recruitment and retention. We are currently in the process of publishing our first articles from the research."

Stephen enjoys gardening, spending time with family and friends and travel. The photo has taken mid-summer on a recent trip to Whistler just out of Vancouver.