The professional practice environment of hospital-based nurses has been the focus of considerable attention over the last few decades. More recently, attention has been paid to the community nursing environment, and this study considers the context of public health nursing in New Zealand.

The purpose of the study was to identify the organizational attributes that public health nurses consider important, and those that are considered less important, for professional practice and to rate the presence of these attributes within the public health nurses’ work environment.

In all, 167 public health nurses across New Zealand assessed the importance and presence of 48 organizational attributes in the nursing work environment using the Nursing Work Index-Revised (NWI-R). This instrument was developed from work with Magnet hospitals in the US and is designed to measure attributes of the professional nursing environment. Frequency distributions and difference scores were calculated using SPSS-PC.

Results showed that there was strong agreement that most NWI-R attributes were considered important for professional practice, the most highly endorsed relating to support from the organization, education/orientation and staffing. However, agreement that these attributes were actually present in the current work environment was much less strong. Participants also generated additional ideas for attributes considered important for public health nursing practice and these were categorized under four headings concerning specialty practice, resources, networking and education/research.