Annette Huntington

Annette Diana Huntington is a New Zealand nursing academic. She is a professor of nursing and head of school at Massey University and previously served as chair of the Nursing Council of New Zealand.
Career.
Huntington became a registered nurse at Auckland Hospital in 1970. After practice as a surgical and later Plunket nurse, she gained a Bachelor of Nursing from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990 - one of the first New Zealanders to receive this qualification - followed by a PhD in nursing from the same institution. Her thesis explored the experiences of nurses as women practising in gynaecological settings, and was one of the first New Zealand doctorates to be awarded specifically in the discipline of nursing.
Huntington began teaching nursing in 1989 at Wellington Polytechnic, joining Massey University after those institutions merged. After being appointed director of the university's nursing programme in 2010, she oversaw nursing's transition to full school status and became head of school in 2013. Under her leadership the Massey University School of Nursing has been the top-ranked nursing faculty for research quality in successive Performance Based Research Fund quality evaluation rounds.
Huntington was an appointed member of the Nursing Council of New Zealand from 2000 to 2006, and chair of the Council from 2001 onwards. As chair she oversaw the complete redesign of nursing regulation in New Zealand following the passage of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003. She was also honorary colonel-commandant of the Royal New Zealand Nursing Corps from 2005 to 2016, and has held a variety of national and international roles, including membership of the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, the 2018 Performance Based Research Fund health panel, and the editorial board of "The Australian Journal of Nursing Practice, Scholarship and Research". She is a member of the Council of Deans of Nursing and Midwifery, Australia and New Zealand, and was the first New Zealand representative to serve as the Council's deputy chair (2015–2017).
Huntington's research focuses primarily on professional, regulatory, and workforce issues in nursing practice. She was the New Zealand director of both the Nurses and Midwives e-Cohort Study (2006–2014), and the associated Graduate Nurses Study, in collaboration with researchers based in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. In the 2012 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, becoming the first to receive this honour for contributions to nursing research.