The central theme of the XVI Catarinense Nursing Workshop tries to focus the main factors interfering with the practice and organization of nursing, and endeavors to apprehend its organization within health services, making at the same time a few reflections on this theme. It also seeks to question, albeit on an incipient way, those most controversial situations in the nursing sphere such as its not always harmonious working relations the role played by the many categories of which nursing is made up, and the stand still the nursing category goes through at the present junctures