Welcome to the 
November edition of the VNJ. Well, the nights have well and truly drawn in, Christmas is fast approaching, and there is a positive damp chill in the air – so what better way to spend a cold evening than to relax with a cup of tea and your VNJ?
We hope that you will agree that we have had another very successful BVNA congress packed full of excellent lectures and an ever-increasing emphasis on evidence based veterinary nursing. It was fabulous to see so many of you in attendance and it really is the highlight of the Veterinary Nursing calendar. BVNA congress always makes me feel lucky and privileged to be part of a profession that is evolving so quickly but this year I was struck once again by the increasing thirst for knowledge, reflection and demand for an evidence base amongst my peers. We hope to bring you some of the research abstracts from the conference in the next edition of the VNJ.
Whilst reviewing the proofs for this month’s journal, I was particularly struck by Mary Ellen Goldberg’s excellent guide to local anaesthetic (LA) techniques. I hope that this is an article that will encourage those of you whose practices don’t currently employ LA techniques in your analgesia armoury to thoroughly consider their use. This is a great step by step guide to some commonly used LA techniques and is packed full of current evidence. I feel that this is an article that may be equally applicable to your veterinary surgeons so please do pass it on. The quality of this article and many others we have received causes me again to be thank our American technician counterparts who are so willing to write for and support our journal. As you will read from her biography, just a reminder than Mary Ellen was previously the Executive Secretary for the International Veterinary Academy of Pain Management (IVAPM) and a Certified Veterinary Pain Practitioner – the Academy and the certification are certainly something that again I would urge those of you with an interest in analgesia to look in to.
As always, the team work hard to provide a variety of content to appeal to all our readers but, if there is something that you feel the VNJ is lacking or a topic that you would like to see covered in more depth then please get in touch. We are also always looking for new authors for the journal so if you have an idea for an article that you might like to write then please email us. We are always more than happy to encourage and mentor new authors.
Editor-in-Chief