For violence prevention, interventions should be sensitive to personal factors. Healthcare institutions should initiate counselling programs to help nurses cope with the stress related to workplace violence.

Participants are experts on their lives and, as such, they adopt appropriate disease control behaviours, based on their experience and knowledge, as well as integrate the illness and its symptoms into their lives. With the worldwide increase in migration, an understanding of the cultural factors that influence patients' perspectives on self-management behaviours is necessary and can contribute to the development of an evidence-based programme for disease self-management with COPD.

Nurse workforce and nurse-sensitive patient outcome indicators are positively correlated. The results of this study will help professional nursing groups define suitable nursing workforce standards for medical institutions.

Healthcare professionals should develop an evidence-based programme for stress management for renal transplantation patients that incorporates strategies to enhance patient's self-efficacy of self-care behaviour. Recipients' beliefs in their ability to successfully perform self-care behaviour can be promoted by a mastery experience, vicarious experience with other patients, social persuasion and re-explanation of somatic and emotional states by discussing coping methods with healthcare professionals.

The Permission/Limited Information/Specific Suggestions/Intensive Therapy-based Nursing Attitudes on Sexual Health Care scale helps to identify nurses' attitudes. A better understanding of nurses' attitudes towards provisional sexual health care will provide information needed to develop appropriate education programmes to improve delivery of sexual health care.

The Nurse Practitioners' Roles and Competencies Scale can be used as a tool for assessing the roles and competencies of nurse practitioners in Taiwan. Our findings can also serve as a reference for other Asian countries to develop the nurse practitioner role.

We recommend that interventions that target sexual health behavioural intentions for this population would be more effective if such interventions targeted normative beliefs and helped adolescent females to clarify their sexual self-concept.

The theory contributes knowledge about the meaning of care-giving for parents of mentally ill children in Taiwan. It should be useful reference for mental health professionals, who provide counselling services to ethnically Taiwanese care-givers.