Karen Hoare

Karen Jean Hoare (née Ball) is a New Zealand professor at Massey University, and is New Zealand's first active nurse practitioner to also be a professor. Her research focuses on models for care for children and young people.

Early life
Hoare was born and raised near Coventry, England, and wanted to be a nurse from an early age.

Career
Hoare initially trained as a paediatric nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, graduating in 1978, and worked there in the paediatric oncology ward before training as a health visitor. During the 1980s, Hoare and her husband, Simon, a paediatrician who she married in 1985, spent two years at a research field station in the Gambia, where Hoare's role was described as "useful wife". Her husband was the only doctor at the station, and so when the numbers of children's cases rose in the wet season, Hoare learned advanced assessments skills in order to run her own children's clinics. Noticing a lack of health literacy, Hoare also set up a rolling eight-week course of health education sessions for mothers, focusing on such issues as hygiene, immunisations, family planning and common childhood diseases. When she returned to assess the impact of this work in 1997, she found it was still causing a "massive reduction" in childhood infectious diseases. Hoare says it was important that she was both a mother (she had two young children at the time), learned the local language, and worked with local women to deliver the programme.

Hoare and her family returned to England in 1991, where she had her third child, and completed a master's degree. After Hoare qualified as a nurse presciber in the late 1990s she took on a role persuading other nurses to take on a prescribing role. She said "You know how nurses have to fight to become prescribers here [New Zealand]? [There,] I had to fight to get them to prescribe". Emigrating to New Zealand, Hoare arrived the year that the role of prescribing nurse practitioners was established, 1993. She worked as an academic nurse at the University of Auckland, and then joined the Greenstone Family Clinic in Manurewa, where she is a practising partner.

Hoare joined Massey University in 2017, rising to full professor in 2021. She is Massey University's Director of Postgraduate Nursing, and leader of the final year Nurse Practitioner Programme. She is New Zealand's first professor and active nurse practitioner.

Hoare's research covers investigating young people's views on the dissemination of information about sexually transmitted diseases, and whether treating infants with paracetamol or ibuprofen increases the incidence of childhood asthma. She also works with researchers at the University of Cape Town and James Cook University to build support for children's nursing in the Pacific. In 2012, Hoare completed her PhD through Monash University.

Awards
In 2021, Hoare was a finalist for Nurse Practitioner of the Year at the New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards.