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The Nursing Council of New Zealand recently reviewed the minimum standard entry criteria for acceptance into undergraduate nursing programmes. The Otago Polytechnic School of Nursing in Dunedin felt it timely to explore the relationship between academic performance and entry criteria. The School's entry criteria included a bioscience requirement, which varied from the Nursing Council criteria. This research explored the relationship between entry criteria and academic performance in the first and second year bioscience papers. The sample consisted of 619 academic records of the 1994-2002 graduates from the Degree Programme. The sample was divided into an under 20-age group (n=323) and a 20 and over group (n=296). This division related to a difference in the entry criteria for each of the groups. Chi-square and correlational analyses found a relationship between entry qualifications and students' academic performance in the two papers. The entry criteria had a stronger relationship with the students' performance in the first year bioscience paper than the second year paper. Performance in the first year was predicative of second year performance. Age was also found to be a useful predictor of grades. These findings support the School's Bioscience entry criteria and provide important information for admission committees.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a catastrophic and costly result of both intentional and unintentional injury. We present data from the Health Statistics Services files of New Zealand for the year 1988 on the epidemiology of SCI resulting in morbidity. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of SCI in the western world and since 1979 this has been increasing. It occurs most often to young, caucasian men and is typically the result of motor transport crashes. The ethnicity adjusted rates show high rates for Maori males. Children in New Zealand have greater than 4 times the risk of an SCI than American children. The rehabilitation and hospital costs for SCI are among the highest for all injuries. There were a higher number of high cervical injuries than reported in previous series and 92% of SCI were incomplete indicating the high rehabilitation potential of the sample. Some measures are suggested to reduce the incidence of SCI.