Performance standards: ensuring that the specialist nurse in palliative care is special

Recently there has been a rapid, if somewhat haphazard, proliferation of specialist roles in palliative care. The need to define levels of nursing practice in palliative care and the appropriate educational input for each level has been acknowledged. This paper discusses how one education team has described levels of practice in the form of performance standards as a basis for developing the curriculum of a postregistration degree course for the specialist nurse in palliative care.