This month marks a very special milestone for Nursing journal as we celebrate our Golden Anniversary-50 years of continuous publication! How appropriate it is that this anniversary coincides with the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. It is quite safe to say that 2020 is a year that none of us will ever forget.
For the past 50 years, Nursing has endeavored to be a valuable resource to all nurses, offering a vast array of relevant, peer-reviewed content to inspire new insights and learning. Some of our seasoned readers may still remember the first issue in 1971. I subscribed to Nursing in 1979 when I entered nursing school and have found it to be invaluable throughout my career. As the nursing profession evolved and new challenges emerged, Nursing journal kept pace.
In this issue, Kathy Carey, our Executive Editor, invites us to take a walk down memory lane in an essay that is brimming with historic nursing trends over the past 50 years (see page 44). Kathy started with Nursing in the 1980s and continues to journey with us, always offering a wealth of editorial knowledge and experience to foster the journalistic quality that our readers have come to expect.
Patricia Nornhold, MSN, RN, and Cheryl Mee, MSN, MBA, RN, FAAN, our previous two editors-in-chief, have contributed to the anniversary section with special messages for readers. I am delighted to have them with us as our guests and friends.
As only the third nurse editor-in-chief, I am honored to have led Nursing since 2009. I look forward to continuing this journey by forging a future that will take on the many difficult issues that our profession is confronting. My agenda certainly includes maintaining our foundational, evidence-based content on clinical topics to promote new knowledge, refresh skills and competencies, and challenge sacred cows. It will also focus on critically important themes that impact nurses in today's practice settings: epidemic burnout, workplace violence, health disparities, and systemic racism, to name a few.
There is a demand for nurse-focused, healthy work environments, as well as strategies to help nurses mitigate overwhelming stressors. We require effective methods to redesign nursing practice in an evidence-based manner to eliminate non-value-added tasks and barriers that prevent nurses from doing what they entered the profession to do: use their knowledge and expertise to take care of patients. We must instill peer and leadership cultures that consistently convey to nurses that they are valued in ways that are both tangible and meaningful. We must intentionally leverage diversity and inclusion through approaches that not only consider racism, but encompass the multigenerational workforce, the varying levels of nursing knowledge and experience, and the individual talents and abilities that make up a nursing and healthcare team. I am specifically seeking content that speaks to these themes so that Nursing2021 and beyond can continue its legacy as a respected resource for all nurses.
We live in a time of great change, challenge, and pain, but also one of unprecedented opportunity to finally fix many seemingly unfixable issues that have long plagued us as nurses and as a society. Please join me as we journey bravely into this future to elevate nursing practice, inspire new ways of thinking, innovate solutions, and energize our teams and ourselves.
Happy Anniversary!
LINDA LASKOWSKI-JONES, MS, APRN, ACNS-BC, CEN, NEA-BC, FAWM, FAAN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, NURSING2020