School of Nursing


Helen Malcom

Pathway to postgraduate studies

Helen continued to study after the completion of her Bachelors and Masters of Nursing (with Distinction) degrees. The focus of her Master’s thesis was an exploration of the ethical issue of privacy in shared hospital rooms. A period of 5 years lapsed between completing the Master’s qualification and commencing study toward a PhD. During that time Helen spent two years in the clinical setting as a clinical charge nurse manager in an older people’s health assessment, treatment and rehabilitation unit. Interest in the topic of her research came about during that period of employment when she had many conversations with the older people and their adult children, and attending family meetings which revealed the difficulty people displayed in preparing for and attending to their ageing needs. These experiences lead Helen to ponder how the experiences of caring for or supporting older relatives may influence the current mid-life adults’ ideas and plans for their own older years and their expectations of support from their own children.

Current work

'Growing older in New Zealand: perceptions and expectations of today's adults regarding their ageing and future support'

The study utilises mixed methods firstly to explore the issues with respect to caring for older people and how these experiences influence ideas and plans for the participants own ageing needs, then seeks to determine whether these ideas are complementary with a wider population group. At this time analysis of the results is progressing with findings indicating many people have expectations of that the state will provide for their ageing needs in the future.