I am sure that all our readers will be delighted with the new look journal and its change of name from Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing to Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Nursing: Building Evidence for Practice. The name and colour of the journal may have changed but the mission parameters remain the same.
The journal is still the oldest dedicated children’s nursing journal in the world and my editorial board colleagues and I remain proud of that tradition and its aspiration to continue to build the evidence base which underpins the art and science of our profession.
The new look journal will continue to contribute to the knowledge base of children’s nurses and other health care professionals who care for children in all health care settings.
We all know that child health nursing is a succinct age related field of practice that requires nurses in practice to acquire detailed knowledge of children’s development to meet their highly specific physiological, psychological, emotional, and social needs, especially when they are sick.
To achieve these interrelated aims children’s and young people’s nurses need to fully understand the complexities of the needs of both children and their families or carers. This specificity of knowledge and its application to practice across the parameters of health care delivery and across the life course health care journey of the child, from the neonatal period through to adolescent transition to adult health care, requires a knowledge source to enable a children’s nurse to work in many areas, e.g., from primary care through to tertiary care, from neonatal intensive care through to child and adolescent mental health care.
Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Nursing aspires to be the focal point for this knowledge source and seeks to illuminate good practice based on sound empirical evidence from academics and practitioners from across international boundaries.
It is known that improving services for children and young people is a complex and multi-faceted issue which attracts significant professional interest and an increasing volume of public and media attention in many countries. We know for example that poor mental health is strongly related to other health and development concerns in young people, but principally lower educational achievements, and substance abuse, among others. Similarly in many health services there are significant problems with transition between paediatric and adult care for young people with chronic illnesses or disabilities which are all too often badly managed, with the potential for adverse outcomes for the health of individual children.
It is because of these shortcomings in service delivery for children in some parts of the world that this journal exits. The editorial board are adamant that every child wherever they are should be offered the best start in life, to ensure that optimum health is achieved, and to reduce the burden of inequalities in health. The journal and the scholarly papers it publishes can help in this quest by bringing to the attention of readers new and innovative ways of delivering care to children and young people in a variety of clinical and primary care settings. The burden of ill health in childhood can only be alleviated if the workforce who delivers care fully understands the complexities of ill health in that age period. This is because of what can happen during childhood, from conception onwards, ranging from obesity, heart disease and mental ill health, though to educational attainment and future economic status.
Florence Nightingale reminds us, “Children: they are affected by the same things [as adults] but much more quickly and seriously” (Nightingale, 1859, p. 72). It is because of this that children’s nurses need access to a journal that recognises the need for children’s nurses to have an up to date and focused source of skills, competencies, and knowledge predicated on best evidence.
This is because, to cite Catherine Jane Wood a well-known 19th century children’s nurse, “Sick children require special nursing and sick children’s nurses require special training.” Whilst this quotation has left a legacy for future historians to use in the preservation as children’s nursing as a discrete part of the nursing profession it also implicitly stresses that children’s nurses not only add days to the life of children they care for but they also add life to days!
Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Nursing: Building Evidence for Practice will continue to give its readers access to cutting edge children’s nursing practice and research as it has done since 1976.
Declaration of Interest
The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this paper.
References
- Nightingale, F. (1970). Notes on nursing: What it is and what it is not. London: Duckworth & Co. ( original work published 1859).
- Wood, C. J. (1888). The training of nurses for sick children. The Nursing Record. 507–510.