Integrating the Values of Leadership in Public Educational Policies for Training Nurses

Nurses are a vital resource of health care systems, a resource that must be valued, bearing in mind that their work has a role in social indicators of health, and also determines topics such as equality and equity, fairness and justice, which support the kind of societies we all want to live in. In the training process, they learn, in the middle of a team, to plan, to put into practice and evaluate general medical care based on acquired knowledge and skills. Future nurses must not only be prepared to meet the needs of the individual, the family, the community, but also to have confidence in their own intellectual and clinical abilities so that they can work responsibly and autonomously, facing at the same time with increasingly complex requirements of healthcare. The refinement of medical training is subsequently achieved by developing the ability to solve problems, to make decisions, to practice leadership in medical care. The acquisition of leadership skills has been identified as a need in training nurses, both from the researches of internal and international professional bodies and from those of clinical units. By harmonizing this need with public educational policies, the unit of learning outcomes "Leadership and professional communication" was implemented in the professional training standard. This paper aims to gain insight into the relationship between the values of leadership and the development of a good educational policy in training nurses, with a fundamental impact on the provision of health care in an efficient, integrated and safe manner for the patient. [For the full proceedings, see ED654100.]