Snakes and ladders: the immediate future of nurse education?

This paper considers the recent increase in proposals to merge colleges of nursing and midwifery with higher education institutions. It reviews the differing natures of proposed mergers. It considers some major challenges posed by such mergers: the academic, the cultural, the professional, personal and identity, and the epistomological. It reflects on some ways in which these challenges might be met by the application of management theory, and enlightened practice. It concludes by suggesting that the opportunities afforded colleges by individual mergers are so divergent as to risk fragmenting nurse education within the higher education sector, rather than uniting it into a coherent whole, and compromising the development of nursing, midwifery and health visiting as learned practice professions.