Territorial reorganization, telemedicine and operative centres: Challenges and opportunities for the nursing profession

We read with great interest the research work by (Charalambous et al., 2024) on nurse-led telemedicine services. The authors highlight the numerous advantages of telemedicine services entrusted to nurses. Italy is going to reform its organizational model of territorial care network (Vinceti, 2023) with the aim of improving the availability and accessibility to citizens of proximity services. For this purpose, investments are being made in telemedicine services while implementing home care, health facilities and health care centres. This reform introduces territorial operative centres (COT) as essential nodes for the management of services healthcare and telemedicine in daily clinical practices. In the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has offered the opportunity to minimize physical contact while providing access to healthcare services including preventive care, monitoring and management of chronic diseases and triage. More generally, we believe that COTs, in combination with telemedicine (Bartz, 2016), offer an unprecedented opportunity to improve access to healthcare services by providing remote assistance, remote patient monitoring and specialized consultancy. We all know that the nursing profession is going through a period of crisis (Ginaldi et al., 2024) and that it is essential to deploy all the forces and strategies available to renew it, making it attractive and satisfying again. New perspectives open up for the nursing profession, offering broader roles and responsibilities. Although their implementation represents a significant opportunity, there are also numerous challenges that nurses will face: continuous training, taking on new roles and responsibilities, increased workload. COTs are based on advanced information systems for data and communications management. We observe that few of our nurses are keeping up with the development of technology and new healthcare models. It will be important that nurses receive adequate training to develop advanced skills, necessary to operate in these new contexts where technology is pressingly entering, also implementing time and resource management strategies to prevent burnout and ensure the quality of care. The digitalization of care processes requires ever-increasing digital skills to guarantee high-level care suited to current knowledge (De Martinis & Ginaldi, 2024). We believe that the reorganization of territorial medicine with the integration of COTs and telemedicine, represent an extraordinary opportunity for the nursing profession with the possibility of taking on new leadership roles to face this new reality by promoting a culture of innovation and efficiency. As Charalambous et al. pointed out, high levels of satisfaction indicate that patients accept nurse-led telemedicine. To address this challenge, it will be essential that our managers and the entire healthcare sector are open to this innovation and support nurses, in terms of training and resources, to play a leading role in actively contributing to the success of these new realities. These changes can improve the quality of care offered, the access to health services, the reduction of waiting lists, the continuity of care and patient satisfaction. All authors contributed equally to the work. No funding to declare. The authors declare no competing interests.