[Eficiency, equity or eficacy? Is it nurses or health systems dilemma?]

Besides the increasing costs of health technologies and the epidemic and demographic transactions, the causes of the current inadequacy of resources in the health field are also to be ascribed to people changed expectations toward nursing and medicine. Such aspects have put in a critical position the working of the health services, which are incapable of facing the escalating and relentless health expenses. The evidence-based approach to the clinical practice and the following output of guidelines as a solution to the rationing of health services, may, in someone opinion, make headway towards the control of expenditure because it allows a synergy between optimal and basic principles. The reasoned use of the resources does not only presuppose that nurses can decide, as far as the patient is concerned, what is strictly necessary and at the same time most effective to the fulfillment of the nursing needs which have been pinpointed; nurses should also commit themselves to organise for the best, according to their level of responsibility, the scenario where clinic decisions are taken and to affect the guidance processes of the strategic choices of the institution they are part of. Nurses, as other professional do, have to honour also a commission which implies, on different levels, to take on an executive function, a teamwork function, an active and responsible cooperation in the working of health service. A superficial and cursory use of the guidelines as an allocation of resources might, on the other hand, raise objections in the name of ethics: health cannot be treated as a commodity, nor can health be subjected to market laws of supply and demand. The degree of legitimation of a health policy must therefore derive from the degree of harmonization and coherence between an evidence element and a social and cultural context where both have to be put a test.