[Why quantitative estimates must and can be dependent variables of clear assumptions and objectives of care]

. Why quantitative estimates must and can be dependent variables of clear assumptions and objectives of care. The pandemic has highlighted the many fragilities of a national health system that for years gave priority in balancing the budget and not in providing a service to the entire population, including fragile and marginalized groups. The attention focused with specific intensity during the pandemia on the critical and broader role of the nursing for the caring component of a National Health Service, is highly suggestive of the need of conceiving the post-pandemia as a period of a reform, which must coincide and translate into a truly research effort. Concrete conceptual and operational protocols should be targeted with priority to areas which have emerged as indicators of unmet care, even more than of clinical needs: from the elderly non-autonomous populations, to the chronicity of the complexities looking to integrated hospital and district care, to the also epidemiologically orphan diverse and care-needing populations for whom no evidence based interventions are accessible/available. Based on the discussion of these premises, the contribution outlines the path leading to real-life protocols, whose fundamental starting point should be the epidemiological and qualified visibility of the populations of interest: their contextualized lives -beyond and above their diagnoses and interventions transformed in economic costs - must and are indicated how to be the baseline starting as well as the outcome end points.