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Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS as a global pandemic in the 1980’s, the focus of the scientific community has been to firstly identify, then treat and ultimately find a cure for, this disease. This has proven to be challenging and far from realistically achievable by the scientific community or the communities affected by this disease. A funding allocation from the National Institutes of Health in the United States came to a consortium in Australia seeking to develop a prime-boost preventative HIV vaccine. The consortium included members of the Australian HIV/AIDS Partnership. This partnership emerged from a particular set of historical contexts and included affected community. The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations was the affected community representative on the consortium. This thesis sets out the contextual and ethical reasons for this arrangement, and explores how this unusual partnership worked in practice, with a view to identifying its broader implications. HIV vaccine development, and AFAO’s role in that development, is complex and multifaceted. The consortium existed within a particular social context which I explore by describing the social history of HIV in Australia. The search for an HIV vaccine is difficult and complex work requiring significant effort and I describe the challenges involved in such an enterprise. Biomedical research more generally exists in the context of international and national research documents which govern the way in which researchers may conduct human experimental trialling. I discuss these documents and highlight the underlying ethical principles. This research involved 9 interviews with 7 key informants who were members of the consortium. The accounts were analysed following a grounded theory approach, utilising the sensitising concepts outlined in the discussion of the social history of HIV in Australia, the science of HIV vaccine development and the general and specific ethical principles. Following this methodolo

A great many people in the community experience a range of chronic debilitating diseases that threaten their wellbeing and eventually lead to their death. The challenge for many practitioners is to provide care that is responsive to the needs of the patient, family and friends. This study seeks to examine this complex relationship and to explore the challenges, particularly the ethical challenges, faced by the practitioners in providing care that is acceptable to the individual, family and friends. The scope of this study, therefore, is upon the practices of oncology and palliative care nurses in three different organisational settings; an acute oncology ward, an acute palliative care unit and a specialist palliative care unit. An exploration of these practices is elicited by encouraging narrative accounts from the nurses working in these different care settings. The nurses were invited to explain their work as practitioners and encouraged to describe the challenges that they faced in the performance of that work. The accounts are devices for provoking reflection upon and questions about oncology and palliative care nursing practice. Therefore, these accounts should be seen as contributing to the conversation about how to care for people in these environments, not as definitive and universalistic claims about what happens in these settings. An analysis of the narratives of the participating nurses revealed many significant themes. There were also significant accounts of the quality of relationships nurses have with their surroundings which impact upon the quality of the care they provide. The key relationships mentioned by the nurses were: relating with patients; relating with family/significant others; relating with colleagues; relating with other health care professionals; relating with the institution; and relating with their profession. The significant themes, or meta-themes, to emerge from the accounts of the nurses were the types of agency encountered, the typ