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In the late 1960s Henry Silver1 and his colleagues in Colorado, recognizing a then current shortage of physicians available to provide health care to children, developed educational programs to prepare two new types of child health professionals—the pediatric nurse practitioner and the child health associate. The pediatric nurse practitioner model has been replicated throughout the United States. By mid- 1980 there were in operation 53 graduate and continuing education programs to prepare nurses to assume an expanded role in the provision of health care to children, and an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 nurses have been so prepared (M. K. Willian, personal communication, July 1980).