Mark Whiting, the chairman of the Royal College of Nursing's Community Children's Nursing Forum, estimates that there are 600 to 800 community children's nurses across the UK but 1,200 are needed.
His calculation is based on the fact that there are about 12.5 million children under 16 in the UK and there should be one community children's nurse for every 10,000 children.
Service provision in the UK is patchy. Some areas have large teams of community nurses, others have just one nurse and many areas do not have any.
Community children's nursing has focused on patients with life-limiting illnesses or who need palliative care. But while about 1,000 children in England and Wales die each year from a life-limiting illness and between 5,000 and 10,000 children have such an illness at any one time, far more use the health service.
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