Challenges and leadership imperatives in cooperation with the World Health Organization

When an institution promotes strategic innovations, it starts the rupture with tradition, causing changes and, consequently, altering the expectations and prospects of both their internal clients, as their external clients.

The engines of the adopted innovations are driven by a broader view of the organization's purposes, expanding its borders in terms of breadth and depth, which assumes the value of diversity, creativity, freedom and social commitment. For each cell of organization, a differentiated productivity is predicted, which previously limited the objectives traditionally agreed.

The process of adoption and implementation of change is slow, faces resistance, receives support and depends on the persistence and initiatives taken by leaders who are able to maintain the march for institutional commitments, gradually adding those that are in favor to the new vision. This combination of "mandatory" and additional commitments, therefore, requires investment in communication and internal and external interconnection. Encouraging interaction and freedom of expression are crucial for successful innovation and the new opportunities to be explored. With this culture of freedom to change, creativity emerges with more fluidity, responsibilities are assumed, shared and implemented to the recognition of the added value to the actions and traditional products of the institution. So, it leads to grouped behavior of adherence to change, which can be checked at the time that the whole group will voluntarily set goals and indicators that reflect the additional commitment that the group itself decided to embrace.

This is the stage where human capital shows from the institution that has already incorporated the change and assumed innovation as a regular part of their duties. In this context, creativity, acceptance of extended commitments, investment in skills, taking advantage of confluent opportunities, as well as human actives of the institution who may take responsibility to convert rhetoric into permanent reality: recognizing the forefront actors as people who are able to successfully exercise the leadership challenge.

In this perspective, institutions working in cooperation with other institutions potentially experience a journey of learning with the challenges faced and effective partnerships.

Some international organizations use this logic and increase results through partnerships with institutions whose profile have convergence with interest and/or need to achieve specific purposes.

An example is the World Health Organization (WHO) that interacts with institutions called by them as "Collaborating Centre". Through this mechanism, by mutual agreement and consent of the governments and after examination of the admissibility indicators, the General Director of WHO designates certain institution to act as Collaborating Centre to develop a specific mission and thus, integrate an international collaborative network to support programs from this organization. Therefore, it is through these centers that WHO optimizes resources, drawing on institutional capacity to reach part of its actions. There are currently 700 Active Collaborating Centre, distributed in more than 80 UN member states, in various health specialties, including 42 in the Nursing field⁽¹⁾.

In Brazil, there are 22 Centers⁽²⁾, including one in the nursing area, located in the Ribeirão Preto School of Nursing, Universidade de São Paulo.

With the mission of contributing to the WHO for the development of nursing research, the experience accumulated in twenty-seven years of working as a Collaborating Centre has allowed the human capital of that institution many learning opportunities, cooperation, leadership, solidarity, commitment, citizenship and working networks. Hosting the General Secretary of the Global Collaborating Centre Network of WHO for the development of Nursing and Midwifery in the period 2008 to 2014 was one of the recognitions of expressions of the leadership of this Centre⁽³⁾, the school that it maintains and the Brazilian nursing, by the members of this global network.

Challenges and lessons learned from successes and failures have been beneficial and show us we should value the collaboration, endeavoring, monitoring and evaluating demands and responses every day in a dynamic process.

REFERÊNCIAS

• ¹
  World Health Organization. Collaborating Centres. WHO collaborating centres database [Internet]. 2015[cited 2015 Nov 20]; Available from: http://www.who.int/collaboratingcentres/database/en
  » http://www.who.int/collaboratingcentres/database/en
• ²
  Organização Pan-Americana da Saúde. Rede de Centros Colaboradores da OPAS/OMS no Brasil: potencialidades e perspectivas. Brasília: Organização Pan-Americana da Saúde; 2010. 162 p.
• ³
  Universidade de São Paulo. Escola de Enfermagem de Ribeirão Preto. Global Network WHO Collaborating Centres for Nursing & Midwifery Development [Internet]. 2015[cited 2015 Nov 20]; Available from: http://www.eerp.usp.br/globalnet/
  » http://www.eerp.usp.br/globalnet/

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Mar-Apr 2016