Norma Chick

Norma P. Chick is an Australian–New Zealand academic, and is an Emeritus Professor of Nursing and Midwifery at Massey University. Alongside Professor Nan Kinross, she is credited with the introduction of nursing academia in New Zealand.

Academic career

Chick began her initial nursing training in Melbourne in June 1947. She later reflected that little of her nursing training encompassed nursing scholarship, and dealt mostly with facts from medicine or psychology rather than concepts. Chick completed a PhD titled Interpersonal needs, norms and performance in nursing at the psychology department at Australian National University in 1974. Her thesis was supervised by Cecil Gibb, Patrick Pentony and Margaret R. Middleton. When she was appointed half-time lecturer in nursing studies at Massey in 1976, she became the first staff member to hold a PhD. One of Chick's students, Louise Rummel, said "She can be credited with influencing the mind-set of a whole generation of nurses from thinking of nursing as only a practical occupation supported by procedural knowledge to one that is scientifically based on sound evidence to provide a clear rationale for nursing judgements and actions."

While Chick was head of that same department in 1992, she published a history of the first twenty years of nursing studies at Massey. and was appointed emeritus professor.

Selected works