A European Blueprint for Community Nursing: Building Care Protocols on International Organization for Standardization...

Care across Europe is moving out of the hospital and into homes and communities. The family and community nurse now stands at the center of this shift, holding continuous responsibility for people where they live. Yet the procedures that guide this work are often written locally and vary widely, with no shared quality architecture behind them. This editorial proposes International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 7101:2023 as a possible common European reference model for designing community nursing care protocols, anchoring each procedure to quality principles such as people-centered care, co-production, risk control, and continual improvement rather than to ad hoc local practice. We develop the case across Europe, including the United Kingdom, where community and district nursing is well established within the National Health Service. We then propose a five-phase heuristic model that turns each procedure into a small, people-centered quality system anchored to the standard. Adopting this approach would curb unwarranted variation, strengthen patient safety, and make community care auditable and open to improvement. The editorial offers an evidence-informed normative proposal rather than an empirical study; the model is preliminary and will require future validation.