O ano dos 70 anos da EEUSP

Abstract

crossdisciplinarity in nursing as a profession and discipline is to sustain the will to care for people, by promoting the best human answers to health problems and life processes. Collaboration requires careful listening and does not deny the need for solitary moments so that the crossdisciplinary contributions of each discipline can be organized and reorganized. Health and disease experiences require professionals whose interest is beyond that of assuring the effi cacy of products and processes. That is the central challenge of teaching and learning how to be a nurse: the genuine interest to understand human experiences and, taking them as the foundation, to judge not only the effi cacy but also adequacy, applicability, and the positive meaning of health interventions.By dealing with the challenges of keeping education, research and extension interconnected in a setting in which working with knowledge is becoming, more and more, the tonic in health professions, it is imperative to maintain a continuous refl ection about the development of human resources for the health area. The World Health Organization recognizes that we currently live a serious global crisis regarding the health workforce (3-4) , characterized not only by the scarcity of professionals, but also by workers with insuffi cient skills and existing in an unbalanced geographical distribution (5) . The result is millions of people without access to health services and an increased risk of health interventions doing more bad than good. These statements are applied to the health workforce in Brazil, but it is important to focus on the case of Brazilian nursing.The rapid increase in the number of seats in private undergraduate nursing courses (6) , often wrongly interpreted as a result of actions to reduce the chronic unbalance in the proportion between physicians and nurses (7) , and the precariousness of work in public health services (8)