The facilities of Islote de Fermina, in Arrecife (Lanzarote), hosted this past Friday the first session of the III Scientific Conference DIE, organized by the Nursing College of Las Palmas on the occasion of the International Nursing Day 2024, which will be commemorated worldwide on May 12.
The event, which will continue in the coming weeks in the islands of Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, focused in this first day on the determining role of nursing professionals within the strategies and initiatives to promote community health.
Among the different presentations and round tables, the inaugural conference of José Ramón Martínez Riera, community nurse and professor at the University of Alicante, entitled Community Nurses: Engine of Change, stood out. Martínez Riera vindicated the need to have nurses in positions of responsibility in health systems in order to implement the care policies that the population expects and needs.
He also called for projecting the voice and social leadership of community nurses, whose presence extends to all areas of the community, to promote healthy environments and ensure social equity and the well-being of citizens. Nurses -he stressed- do not work for the community, but in and with the community, proactively, promoting participation and involving the population itself, with the aim of building a better and healthier society.
"The future of care" –he stated– "involves giving more time, space and dedication to the work of community nurses, so that they can apply their scientific knowledge and practical experience to improve people's lives. In this sense, he rejected technological innovations that involve mechanizing or robotizing care". Thus, "the changes and improvements that health systems need" –in his opinion– "require a greater humanization of health care, which requires more resources to increase direct individual attention compared to the depersonalized model of today and more resources to increase family home care compared to the telephone or virtual care models that are currently promoted".
The Conference also reviewed the past, present and future of nurses who lead community work in the field of health, giving voice to different professional experiences, patient schools and citizens who are part of group activities to promote health in the Canary Islands. S
antiago González Campos, professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, gave the lecture entitled The way to take better care of ourselves, Lara Edurne González, from the Madrid Society of Family and Community Nursing, spoke about the different ways of being present in the community, while Aarón Plasencia, deputy director of Nursing of the Primary Care Management of the island of Tenerife, spoke about the need to empower the nursing profession, while urging nurses themselves to assume the leadership and responsibility required to make care a priority of public health systems.
Opening
In the opening speech of the Conference, the president of the Nursing College of Las Palmas, Rita Mendoza, asked that the crucial role of nursing be recognized in maintaining healthy and healthy communities. Nurses -she said- guarantee universal access to health services thanks to their work of accompanying and caring for the population. Mendoza demanded that political leaders and health system managers put nursing care at the center of health strategies in order to adequately care for an increasingly aging society with more chronic pathologies. Care -added the president- is not only a rising value that defines advanced societies, but it is above all a right of citizenship, essential to develop a dignified life.
The opening of the Conference also included the intervention of the director of the Health Area of Lanzarote, Esther Machín, who thanked the vocational effort, daily involvement and excellence in health care of nursing professionals, without whose work the functioning of the health system would be impossible. For his part, the Minister of Social Welfare and Inclusion of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Marciano Acuña, offered the support of the island institution in the construction of a culture of care. He also expressed the active commitment of the Cabildo conejero with the Canarian strategy of islands and municipalities promoting health, which has recently joined with the aim of promoting new initiatives and projects for the prevention and promotion of health among the citizens of Lanzarote.
