Rummel, who lectured in nursing at Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) for 40 years, and was instrumental in converting its nursing programme to a degree qualification, died aged 88 in August.
She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2024 for her services to nursing education, after a career of more than 60 years as a clinician and educator.
‘I’m a very ordinary person’
Commenting on her honour, she said: “It’s very humbling – I consider myself a very ordinary person who has learnt from the greats in the nursing profession. As the saying goes, I was standing on the shoulders of giants“.
Her daughter, Simonne Rummel, also a nurse, paid tribute to her mother as demonstrating “excellence in nursing, talented teaching, insightful researching and outstanding mentorship of nurses for over 60 years”.
Trained at Wellington Hospital, Louise Rummel becoming a registered nurse 65 years ago, in August 1960. Her clinical experience ranged over medical, gynaecological and plastic surgery fields, and she also worked as a public health nurse.
Clinic for railways workers
In the 1960s she also set up and ran the first occupational health clinic for New Zealand Rail workers at the railway workshop in Whanganui.
Her first role, after joining MIT in 1984, was as a clinical tutor at Middlemore Hospital; then followed positions as tutor, deputy department head and principal lecturer. She played a key role in the transition of MIT’s undergraduate nursing diploma programme to a bachelor of nursing degree, and helped set up research papers for undergraduate nurses.
Completing a PhD in nursing in 2001, she held the first research academic lead position at the MIT nursing school.
Louise Rummel strongly believed in the importance of nursing students having a positive experience in their clinical placements, which necessitated having good preceptors to guide them. Her masters thesis, completed in 1993, was titled: The Proving Ground: the lived world of nursing students in their pre-registration clinical experience.
Supporting new graduates
On a similar theme, she wrote for Kaitiaki in 2022 about how vital it was to support new graduates. Reporting on a research project which examined how well a bachelor of nursing programme prepared students for the workforce, she noted: “Both the expert nurses and the new graduates emphasised the importance of having a supportive clinical environment for the new nurses to develop their confidence and skills, where they could ask for help they needed.”
Rummel served on NZNO’s nursing and midwifery advisory committee and was secretary of its research section. She was made an honorary member of NZNO in 2004 and wrote for Kaitiaki Nursing New Zealand as well as serving as a peer reviewer for Kaitiaki and NZNO’s research journal, Kaitiaki Nursing Research.
In other contributions to the profession, she was lead investigator for the most recent tranche of interviews for the New Zealand Nursing Education and Research Foundation (NERF) oral history project, which were completed in 2023. And Rummel was lead author of a history of MIT’s school of nursing and health studies, titled What Jan Began (published in 2015).