The Evolution of the Nursing Profession in Italy: from Care to Cure or a Different Form of Care?

Abstract

The nursing profession in Italy has undergone significant changes over the past 20 years, especially after a series of reforms that have transformed work in the health field. In this framework, the basic principle of nursing, which is to “care”, tends to integrate with forms of “cure” in the medical sense and to develop new forms of care in specialized fields. Starting from this premise, this paper aims to analyze the evolution of the nursing profession in Italy towards new models of nursing care, in particular by using some data collected in the Second National Survey on Nursing by the Centre of Excellence for Nursing Scholarship Ipasvi in 2013. The aim of this work is to demonstrate how the new professionalized nurses developed new forms of care, and new nurses’ roles for Italy such as the family nurse or the specialist nurse. However, the practical application of these new models of nursing care in Italy seems to be delayed by an ingrained medical dominance that, sometimes, tends to replace itself in mutant forms.