Each fall HHN holds its annual editorial board meeting at the National Association for Home Care (NAHC) convention. This year's convention was held October 26-30 in Salt Lake City, UT. Our meetings typically occur early in the morning. We met at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast and had a great discussion about your journal.
Eighteen members of our editorial board attended-they are pictured below so you can put some faces with the names of these frequent HHN authors. Two members flew to Salt Lake just to attend the meeting! It's obvious that this group (as well as several who were unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts) have a commitment to you and to bringing you the best information possible.
Our editorial board's roles are similar to those of other peer-reviewed professional journals and they mainly act as advisors to me as editor and to Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, our publisher. They help decide subjects, and suggest and work directly with authors-many represent HHN at specific meetings, serve as guest editors and authors, and give ongoing feedback regarding new content, ideas, and strategies.
The editorial board assures that the best peer-reviewed articles are published in the journal by serving as reviewers. Additionally, they work in small groups, depending on their area of expertise (research, management, accreditation and regulation, or clinical concerns) to develop specific journal policies and procedures.
To become a member of any journal's editorial board, you must be actively involved in the profession and in a specialty area of practice. Potential members should have published several times in various publications and held leadership positions. Many editorial board members are former manuscript reviewers, column editors (our column editors are members of the editorial board), or authors who've written numerous articles for the journal. An applied journal like HHN requires that board members have expertise of how various issues impact upon nursing practice and agency operations.
I encourage all of you who are interested in becoming an editorial board member in any professional journal to plan how to make it happen. It's a rewarding position; you meet and network with wonderful people and shape the content and subjects that become the evidence and research support for practice that appear in the literature.
FIGURE