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Effective promotion of nursing as a career to high school students can potentially have a positive impact on the shortage of nurses. This study identified the perceptions of high school careers advisers of the Bachelor of Nursing program as a career choice, their perceptions of the attributes and characteristics necessary for nurses, and their perceptions of nurses' roles and responsibilities. These perceptions have not been previously identified in Australia and may not have been adequately considered in the planning of recruitment and retention strategies for nursing. The study findings suggest that careers advisers recognise the complexity of nursing practice in providing direct patient care and the range of attributes required for the registered nurse who provides this care. Careers advisers recognised that nursing had changed over the past ten years, although few perceived the roles and responsibilities of nurses to extend beyond activities related to patient care. There were few requests for information about nursing as a career from careers advisers and the findings indicates that they do not actively promote nursing as a career. This suggests that despite a range of initiatives to promote registered nursing as a career choice, careers advisers are not influencing significant numbers of school students to consider registered nursing as career.

The transition from student to an accountable health professional is a difficult time for the novice nurse and can result in significant anxiety, stress and poor socialisation into the nursing profession. A strategy applied at a major tertiary teaching hospital to address transitional issues for novice nurses is that of group debriefing sessions. This qualitative study used focus groups to explore the effectiveness of these debriefing sessions for new graduate nurses and trainee enrolled nurses. The results demonstrated that the sessions provided nurses with a supportive environment, access to peer support and a sense of belonging. This provided an opportunity to develop confidence in their nursing competence and improvement in interpersonal communication skills. Debriefing sessions are an effective psychosocial support mechanism that can ameliorate the 'reality shock' experienced by nurses in their first year of practice. Group debriefing is an important component in the transitional support process and should be used to complement other strategies to enhance the psychosocial experiences of novice nurses.