Children's nursing: can it justify a separate existence in the UK?

There is currently debate about how the professional register for nurses is organized in the UK. Children's nurses, like the other minority registrants of mental health and learning disabilities nurses felt threatened with the potential loss of a separate register. Children's nurses should be able to articulate their own unique body of knowledge. Using Fawcett's framework for the hierarchy of contemporary nursing knowledge, the development of children's nursing knowledge is examined to determine if, indeed, children's nursing is a separate discipline, by having its own metaparadigm of children's nursing, philosophy, conceptual model of nursing, nursing theories and, finally, empirical indicators. Although some levels of knowledge appear to have been developed, it is considered that children's nursing is still lacking in some levels of knowledge, thus suggesting that the continuing development of children's nursing knowledge is necessary.