2020 is the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife! This designation was approved in the World Health Assembly and represents a campaign of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners, such as the International Confederation of Midwives, the International Council of Nurses, and the United Nations Population Fund.
The objective of the campaign is to acknowledge the work of nurses and midwives around the world, and advocate for greater investments in this workforce, their conditions of employment, education and professional development. In addition, the strengthening of nursing and midwifery will bring the benefits of generating health (SDG3), promoting gender equity (SDG5), contributing to economic development (SDG8), and favoring other Sustainable Development Goals.
“Nursing and midwifery professionals are the backbone of all health systems: in 2020 we will encourage all countries to invest in nursing and midwifery staff as part of their commitment to health for all”, declared Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO.
WHO also supports, in collaboration with the International Council of Nurses, the Nursing Now campaign, a Burdett Trust for Nursing program that is supported by a Campaign Board composed of nurses and non-nurses from around the world.
Nursing Now is a global campaign to improve health by raising the status and profile of nursing, which was launched in 2018 and will run until the end of 2020, the bicentennial year of the birth of Florence Nightingale, and the International Year of Nursing and Midwifery Professionals.
PAHO joins these campaigns and will generate a series of actions in the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, which can be followed in:
The Nursing Now campaign has the support of many countries in the Region. For example, Brazil set three goals:
- To invest in the strengthening of education for and the development of nursing professionals with a focus on leadership;
- To invest in improving the work conditions of nursing professionals;
- To disseminate effective and innovative nursing practices based on scientific evidence, nationally and regionally.
The launching included the participation of Carissa F. Etienne, director of PAHO, who declared that “PAHO recognizes that, in order to achieve universal health, we need transformations in services based on the strategy of Primary Care in Health. Nursing professionals, who make up the largest number of health professionals globally, are the key to universal health. Without them, we will not be able to reach it by 2030”.
BIREME, in the framework of its mission to democratize access to information, knowledge and evidence in health, contributes extensively to these global and regional campaigns, placing in the hands of nursing professionals high quality scientific literature and nursing techniques, selected and available in the Virtual Health Library – VHL Nursing.
Nursing VHL
VHL Nursing has the objective of selecting, organizing and disseminating the best scientific production in the area, in order to facilitate the access to the best scientific evidence for professionals, students and decision makers in nursing.
The portal uses the methodologies and technologies for information management developed by BIREME, under the coordination of the School of Nursing at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and with the collaboration of a network of institutions who produce technical and scientific information in nursing from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica.
This VHL provides multiple sources of information about the nursing, among which the main ones are:
- Nursing Database – BDENF: Database of bibliographic records, with articles from journals, postgraduate thesis, Clinical Practice Guides, evaluated systematic reviews, among other documents.
- Nursing Journals Portal – REV@ENF: Portal of scientific journals that uses SciELO methodology. Their articles are also recovered from LILACS and BDENF databases.
- Formative Second Opinion – SOF Nursing : Questions and answers based on evidence related to the priority issues of primary health care and nursing. Link.
- Windows of Knowledge in the History of Nursing: Space that portrays the evolution of the nursing profession in the world. It retrieves knowledge about Nursing and Health in the historical-social context and itinerary through photographs, videos, filmography, written documents, biographies, rare works, conferences, articles, and academic papers.
- Search strategies in VHL Nursing – Brazil: Collection of search strategies developed by information professionals in cooperation with specialists from the relevant areas, favoring the recovery of specific and qualified information to subsidize decision making and/or clinical decision.
The VHL Nursing is a reference in scientific information in the field, with access rates that exceed one million page views per year and an average of 100,000 users per year.
BIREME has developed other products and services that cater for a wider audience, but which are also very useful for nurses. Some of them are listed below:
VHL Primary Health Care (PHC): Virtual Library that brings relevant information to doctors, nurses, health technicians, and PHC professionals in general.
My VHL: Mobile app. It offers to registered users personalized services free of charge, such as: the creation of collections of documents selected from the VHL; definition of topics of interest for sending related documents; history of searches conducted in the VHL; list of favorite links and list of user posts.
e-BlueInfo: Mobile app that brings information to the palm of the hands of PHC professionals, with access to guides, standards, protocols and others, selected by specialists from the Ministries of Health of the countries in the region.
Links of interest
International VHL Nursing: http://bvsenfermeria.bvsalud.org/
Nursing Now: https://www.nursingnow.org/
Nursing Now Brasil: http://nursingnowbr.org/
Nursing Now. Who we are: https://www.nursingnow.org/who-we-are/
Year of Nursing and Midwifery Professionals. Key messages: https://www.who.int/es/campaigns/year-of-the-nurse-and-the-midwife-2020/get-involved/key-messages
The International Year of Nursing and Midwifery Professionals has begun: https://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15668:2020-marks-the-international-year-of-the-nurse-and-midwife&Itemid=1926&lang=es