Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: Preserving children’s undergraduate nurse education in the move towards genericism in nursing

Abstract

Approaches to nurse education vary internationally. Our approach in the United Kingdom (UK), together with countries including Germany, Italy, and Republic of Ireland is unusual, where fieldspecific undergraduate nurse education programmes are standard. This approach allows nurses to register as children's nurses without undertaking generalist training beforehand. Recently, arguments have been made for a move back towards generalist nurse education (Purssell and Sagoo, 2023). This has been met with passionate refutation from children's (Fallon, 2023), learning disability (Cogher, 2023), and mental health (Warrender, 2022) nursing colleagues.Internationally, generalist nurse education is standard (van Kraaij et al., 2023). In most countries, nurses wishing to specialise in the care of babies, children or young people, or other specialities undertake post-registration, postgraduate training (Clarke, 2017). Arguments for generalised education surround the universality of this approach, where all nurses are trained to meet the needs of people across a lifespan. Purssell and Sagoo (2023) suggest that removing general elements of nurse education in the United Kingdom has resulted in an inflexible British nursing workforce.In 2018, the UK nursing regulator, Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) launched new education standards, designed to tackle the health of the UK population, following national inquiries and reports, including Prime Ministers Commission (2010), Francis (2013), and Keogh (2013). These Future Nurse Standards (NMC, 2018) have led to a move towards 'a model, constructed on quantifiable skills and competencies ' (Connell et al., 2022:473) that are applied to all preregistration nursing students, regardless of field. This approach undermines elements of a children's nurses' role, owing to the generic, skills-based design. Our question is should our children's nursing baby be thrown out with associated bathwater? As children's nursing academics involved in providing care and educating future children's nurses, we strongly support the preservation of