Today’s European societies and healthcare systems are facing major challenges as demographics are changing and the population is ageing, increasing the demand for health and social care services, while at the same time there is a political reluctance to increase public expending on health and social care. Consequently, healthcare professionals are under severe pressure delivering high quality of care, with fewer financial and human resources and nurses leaving the profession. Thus, Europe’s health and social care eco-systems are going through profound changes, embracing value-based approaches, and digitalisation. However, these two pose the question of how healthcare professionals, and particularly the nurses, will be equipped with the right skills-set to be able to continue delivering high quality and safe care.
With the view of gathering EU healthcare stakeholders to discuss the need to uptake health innovation through skills development, the European Regions Research and Innovation Network (ERRIN) organized the event to which the EFN was invited to participate as a speaker and a panellist, even replacing the European Commission to talk about Skills, Competencies and in particular Directive 2013/55/EU, article 31.
The EFN took this opportunity to remind all stakeholders present that the nurses’ curricula in all nursing schools in the EU need to comply with the competencies as set out art. 31 of Directive 2013/55/EU. Participants got to know more about the EFN Competency Framework Guideline to implement these 8 competencies into national nurses’ education programmes. Also, the composition of the nursing workforce is a key issue for the uptake of innovation in health and social care ecosystems. The EFN Workforce Matrix 3+1 should be used by all stakeholders in charge of healthcare workforce policies at local, regional, national and EU level to get the right composition of skills delivering integrated and continuity of care. Therefore the EFN insisted on the importance of putting in place a cross-border Electronic Health Records within the EU, respecting the local, regional and national existing EHR and empowering citizens. The two important Horizon2020 projects on EHR, InteropEHRate and Smart4Health are therefore key to co-design fit-for-purpose solutions for the end-users: patients, citizens and health professionals.