RESEARCH ARTICLE

The role of a clinical nurse ert str ed ut ul ns du e, as well as in the United Kingdom (UK), United States of advanced practice nurses during the past decade and have Wilkes et al. BMC Nursing (2015) 14:25 DOI 10.1186/s12912-015-0075-9categories reflecting complexity and involvement. Fry,Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleAmerica (USA) and Canada [6-8]. Since 1992, the CNC role in NSW, Australia has been delineated into domains of practice with functions attached to each domain. This developed a tool [2,11,12] to investigate the CNC role which has similar but slightly different descriptors of the functions/activities than those standardised in NSW [5]. The five domains of activities defined by this research team are: clinical service and consultancy, clinical leader-ship, research, education and clinical service planning and management. Each of their domains has ten hierarchica