[Building skills for the nurse's educational actions in primary health care]

This is a study to review the methodological process developed to built a profile of competencies required for nurse's educational actions. It was a qualitative research, in the historical and dialectical materialism, that used competence as the conceptual category, anchored in the conceptions of work in health and operating knowledge. The subjects were teachers and students of the School of Nursing of University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil; nurses, managers and patients of health services connected to USP. The speech analysis technique was used to analyze the speeches. All groups addressed contained similarities related to knowledge, skills and attitudes required to the development of more dialogical and participative educational practices. The methodological approach described enable the construction of a profile of competencies related to nurse's educational actions, in a collective perspective, closer to the population's health needs.