The popular nursing care initiative 'For Strong Nursing Care' is calling for more nursing staff and quality safeguarding in nursing care. The Swiss parliamentary Commission for Social Security and Health recently presented an indirect counterproposal to this popular initiative.
The counterproposal adopts a number of the initiative's important demands and aims to:
- counter the nursing staff shortage; and
- increase nursing staff skills with an educational campaign.
An eight-year period of financial assistance from the federal government and the cantons is planned in order to increase the number of qualified nurses.
On 27 November 2019 the Federal Council decided to support the counterproposal and the strengthening of nursing education in principle. However, the Federal Council proposes financial support which is Sfr100 million lower than the counterproposal and rejects the idea of nursing staff being able to invoice their services directly to the health insurers, as the popular initiative and the counterproposal are demanding.(1)
Endnotes
(1) For further details please see here.
