The EU-funded Ens4Care project has developed five guidelines for European nurses and social workers on how to use eHealth for promoting a healthy lifestyle and prevention, clinical practice, skills development for advanced roles, integrated care and nurse ePrescribing.
Nurses and social workers with the right knowledge, skills and opportunities, can help prevent diseases by acting as a health coach, they can perform telemonitoring, give telehealth advice and prescribe medication via ePrescription.
To produce these guidelines, the ENS4Care network brought together 24 partners from all over Europe, with a mix of professional associations in nursing and social care, nursing regulators and unions, informal carers, patients, researchers and research communities, civil society representatives and industry. They collected a total of 122 existing good practices of using eHealth tools by nurses and social workers at both national and regional levels. EFA had to opportunity to review them in 2014 while they were under development.
The resulting guidelines aim to inform not only the health and care sector, but also policy-makers to help them in the decisional process about health and care systems, eHealth policies and delivery of care across the EU.