As every year, Ursula van der Leyen, President of the European Commission, will be delivering her State of the Union address to the European Parliament on 14 September 2022, followed by a plenary debate.
Her speech will address the achievements of the past year and presents the priorities for the year ahead, next to setting out how the European Commission will address the most pressing challenges the European Union is facing, and ideas to shape the future of the EU. The State of the Union address will launch the dialogue with the European Parliament and the Council on the European Commission Work Programme for 2023.
As part of the European Commission’s ambition to build a greener and more digital Europe, the 2022 State of the Union address is expected to raise the role of human-centric digital transformation in advancing Europe’s digital decade targets by 2030, with digital skills being an important area which requires investment and progress.
From a nursing perspective, digitalisation is very high on the EFN policy agenda, since digitalisation of healthcare is completely transforming not only the way healthcare is provided by nurses and other healthcare professionals, but also the clinical experience of patients. The EU is driving health system reform through digitalisation with nurses providing their views, experience and expertise as end-users, namely through 3 EU projects in which the EFN is a partner: InteropEHRate (coming to an end in September) and Smart4Health – both aiming to empower the EU citizens by developing apps/cloud that would contain their Electronic Health Records, making their health data available at their fingertips; and the just started BeWell EU project aiming to build a movement of all healthcare stakeholders supporting and committed to the development, implementation, and upscaling of the strategy on upskilling and reskilling of the European health workforce ; and to develop a green and digital skills strategy for the health ecosystem that can be implemented at a local, regional, national, and at the European level through the Pact for Skills.