John Aggergaard Larsen, PhD Head of Evaluation, Rethink Telephone: +44 207 330 9121 E-mail: john.larsen@rethink.org References Ehrenrich B & Hochschild AR (eds) (2002) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Granada Books, London. Larsen JA (2006) Overseas nurses: tackling discrimination. Nursing and Residential Care 8, 368–370. Likupe G (2008) Commentary on Larsen. Journal of Clinical Nursing 17, 2512–2515. Smith P, Allan H, Henry L, Larsen JA & Mackintosh M (2006) Valuing and recognising the talents of a diverse healthcare work- force. University of Surrey, available at: http://portal.surrey.ac.uk/ reoh COMMENTARY Commentary on Back-Pettersson S, Hermansson E, Sernert N and Bjorkelund C (2008) Research priorities in nursing – a Delphi study among Swedish nurses. Journal of Clinical Nursing 17, 2221–2231 Hugh McKenna and Sinead Keeney The use of the Delphi technique in nursing and health research has increased dramatically over recent years and shows no signs of abating. The technique has been frequently used to identify the research priorities in many different areas of nursing and health research. Bond and Bond (1982) used the technique to establish clinical nursing research priorities as did many others (Lindeman 1975, Alderson et al. 1992, Forte et al. 1997, Lynn et al. 1998, Daniels & Ascough 1999, Soanes et al. 2000, Cohen et al. 2004, Annells et al. 2005). It has also been used to identify the research priorities in other areas of health care including HIV/AIDS (Sowell 2000); occupational health (van der Beek et al. 1997, Sadhra et al. 2001); occupational medicine (Harrington 1994); health sector library and information services (Dwyer 1999); oncology (Browne et al. 2002); paediatric haematol- ogy, oncology, immunology and infectious diseases (Soanes et al. 2003) emergency care (Bayley et al. 1994, 2004; Rodger et al. 2004); midwifery (Fenwick et al. 2006); orthopaedic nursing (Salmond 1994); paediatric cancer nursing (Monterosso 2001); health informatics (Brender et al. 1999); dentistry (Palmer & Batchelor 2006); urologic nursing (Demi et al. 1996) and public health (Misener et al. 1994). Back-Pettersson et al.’s (2008) study reports on research priorities identified by Swedish nurse using the Delphi technique. An expert panel of 118 clinicians was recruited and in total 338 nursing research areas were identified by the panel. This is a large number of research areas and illustrates the range of responses that can be generated by the Delphi technique and the wide range of research that is perceived by nurses to be required. Perhaps this is why most research priority studies that use the Delphi now tend to focus on a specific area of nursing, such as cancer nursing (McIlfatrick & Keeney 2003) or school nursing (Edwards 2002), rather than nursing in general. Authors: Hugh McKenna, BSc, DPhil, RGN, RMN, RNT, Dip N (Lond), Adv Dip Ed, Dean of the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences, University of Ulster, Ulster, Northern Ireland; Sinead Keeney, BA, MRes, PhD, Institute of Nursing Research, School of Nursing, University of Ulster, Ulster, Northern Ireland Correspondence: Hugh McKenna, Dean of the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences, University of Ulster, Ulster, Northern Ireland. Telephone: 028 9070 324491. E-mail: hp.mckenna@ulster.ac.uk Ó 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation Ó 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 17, 2511–2520 2515 doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2702.2008.02411.x