Healthcare, the professional profile of the nurse turns 30

Tomorrow, September 14, it will be exactly 30 years since Ministerial Decree no. 739 of 1994 that defines the professional profile of the nurse. The epochal turning point was to provide a definition of the nurse’s functions as a ‘healthcare worker’, with competence, autonomy, responsibility, who acts according to basic training – in 1994 academic training began with university degrees – and who operates through a method, which is the nursing care process. The historical issue of the job description dating back to 1974 was therefore overcome – even if not immediately legally, but at least in substance. It is an epochal date – we read in a note released by the National Federation of Nursing Professions (Fnopi) – completed in its entirety with Law 42 of 1999, which established the nurse as a ‘professional who operates with autonomy, responsibility, competence, taking into account the constraints given by the skills of other professions’.

The ministerial decree was a piece that has allowed, in these 30 years, the improvement of academic training with three-year courses, master’s degrees, research doctorates, further specialization courses and master’s degrees, which has opened up to specialized training and a governance role of other figures. Thanks to this provision, the profile of the nurse today is known as a well-rounded professional who works in a multidisciplinary team, who continues to train and provide training, who has the role of governing support workers. This is an important milestone that has allowed, in these decades, to build an important path, both from the training point of view and from the organizational point of view. Today we have nurses with a master’s degree who occupy important positions in various structures, up to the apical level. An important evolution from the legal, disciplinary, professional point of view.

Thirty years after its first emanation, however, this profile deserves a re-examination. The nursing profession has a field of activity and responsibility that is given by what it acquires during the basic enabling training, during the specialist training and by the Code of Ethics. These are the parameters that delimit what it does, what it can do and what it should take charge of. We will probably reach the moment in which this profile, accompanied by so many years of history and evolution, will be ready to give way to an intellectual and professional connotation that is that of self-regulation, as for all other intellectual professions.