Raising the nursing profile: the case of the invisible nurse.

The reform of nursing and midwifery is a key concern of health services in the CCEE/NIS. This major change will be impossible without accurate and up-to-date information made readily available to nursing leaders and to people helping them with the reforms. At present, however, such information is hard to come by and nurses remain statistically neglected--the case of the Invisible Nurse. The WHO Regional Office for Europe has launched a project to tackle this through the development of nursing and midwifery profiles. Such profiles were created for each of these countries, and they have proved useful to nursing leaders, WHO staff and consultants and other agencies and researchers. Despite the problems arising from limited WHO resources, the quality of the data collected and differences in terminology, the success of the profiles has laid the foundation for future work: completing the profiles for the central and eastern countries and answering the demands for profiles for other Member States of the European Region. The data thus compiled would enable a comparative analysis of nursing in the Region to be made, with the tracking of trends and perhaps the design of indicators of nursing development in countries.