Culture, leadership and workload issues impact nurses' ability to attend continuing professional development. The consequences affect competence to practice, the provision of safe, quality patient care, maintenance of professional registration, job satisfaction, recruitment and retention. Organizational leadership plays an important role in supporting attendance at continuing professional development as an investment for the future.

Problem statement: In order to support the needs of the staff working in discrete areas of nursing, the attitudes, behaviors and needs of the group must first be articulated. Unfortunately, there has been little research conducted to understand the culture of what it is that health care workers think and feel and why they make the choices they do in their working environment and also why they chose to leave the environment. Specifically, what do intensive care clinicians think about the work they do when managing end-of-life care in this technical, highly skilled environment. The focus of an ethnographic study conducted in an Australian hospital in 2007 was to describe the attitudes, behaviors and social conscience of this group whilst they provided end-of-life care. Conclusion: Staff were unable to control many factors that impact on the capacity of professional practice within the intensive care environment. In response to this limited control, staff developed tactics for managing the varying levels of expected clinical service delivery associated with varying possible outcome for each individual patient admission. This research garnered three discrete groups of coping strategies: physical, social and psychological. Future research may demonstrate capacity to engage in such coping strategies has a direct link to clinical longevity.

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Advanced care planning should be something all health professionals consider when interacting with their patients/clients. It should be a consideration when people are well; something that is encouraged to be discussed in the home amongst family members; and amongst the health care team in the event of chronic or terminal illness diagnosis. Accordingly, this poster will support the premise of the undergraduate educators at Edith Cowan University, that Advanced Care Planning must be integrated into the undergraduate pre-registration nursing education programme. The findings to date are anecdotal and relate purely to student and graduate nurse feedback to lecturers. Integrating Advanced Care Planning into the undergraduate programme: assists in encouraging student and beginner-level nurses to consider the appropriateness of care for patients/clients assists in enabling nurses to encourage discussion about advanced care planning amongst the health care team, patients (and their families), and student families assists in encouraging student and beginner-level nurses in advocating for their patient/client wishes toward the end of life.

Background: The Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association of Western Australia provides information, education and advocacy for people living with MND. The role and function of the personnel who provide this service has not been described in the literature and is therefore poorly understood by both healthcare professionals and the public. Purpose: To describe the role and function of the West Australian Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA [WA]) Care Advisors (CAs). Method: Ethnographic observation of seven MNDA (WA) CAs in their normal daily setting. Interviews with end users of CA service (people living with MND and their carers). Analysis of the observations and interview transcripts was undertaken to identify themes. Findings: The CAs were observed to undertake their supportive role with passion. Clarity around the role and function was ambiguous, even amongst the people in the roles. It is suggested this is due to limited formalised processes and procedures in an organisation that has moved from originally being run by volunteers through to a professional not-for-profit organisation. This in turn led to issues in recruitment and retention, clinical knowledge versus clinical care and demonstrating capabilities against Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) for reporting to funding bodies. Conclusion: Multiple opportunities were highlighted during this study for these service providers to develop robust procedures to record the nature of their work, develop resilience in their work place, and ensure ongoing professional develop processes are engaged.