Universal Access to Health and Universal Health Coverage: Nursing contributions

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). In view of the inseparable relation among teaching, resarch and practice, nursing research priorities were listed for the region of the Americas, based on the concepts of Universal Access to Health and Universal Health Coverage, to guide nursing research on health systems and services. The six main categories in the priorities are: nursing human resource policies and education; structure, organization and dynamics of health systems and services; science, technology, innovation and information systems in public health; funding of health systems and services; health policies, governance and social control and social studies in health (4). Further details on that list are available in the newly published articles by the Pan American Health Organization Regional Advisor on Nursing and Nursing Technicians and her collaborators in the American Journal of Nursing. researchers, through calls for papers, to publish scientific contributions on the theme. In addition, the journal has invited some experts to present, based on background experiences, the contributions of Nursing to the strengthening of health systems in different countries, in view of the relevant role nursing professionals play in the delivery of health services. In the set of articles published, the contributions resulting from the studies are highlighted, shown next.