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

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 field-specific 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.