Universal Access to Health and Universal Health Coverage: Nursing contributions

摘要

Universal Access to Health is considered to be the absence of sociocultural, organizational, economic, geographic and gender-related barriers in health care, and Universal Health Coverage to be the capacity of health systems to respond to the populations' needs at any care level, providing infrastructure, appropriately skilled human resources and health technologies without causing financial damage (1) . To respond to these demands, global actions are needed that involve different stakeholders. What the activities of nursing human resources are concerned, the Resolution of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) "Human Resources for health: increasing access to qualified health workers in primary health care-based health systems" (2) advocates the preparation of nurses with advanced practice qualifications to work in primary care services. Advance practice nurses have gained expert knowledge, complex decision making skills and clinical competences for advanced practice, whose characteristics are determined by the context and/or the country the worker is accredited to practice in. The entry level for this education is the Master's degree(3).