This is a landmark issue of Nursing Research. When Nursing Research and Advances in Nursing Science announced a collaborative initiative featuring scholarly articles focusing on violence, injury, and human safety, it marked the profession's acceptance of injury as a respected area of nursing research. This event is of monumental importance to the future of nursing as it will help facilitate the research needed to prevent injury and to improve patient care.
In the past, nursing schools offered undergraduates perhaps 30 minutes of content about elder abuse, another 30 minutes on intimate partner violence, and maybe 30 minutes on child abuse, but there was little mention of nursing research in these areas. For decades, nurses cared for the victims of violence and discussed the need for better methods to keep patients safer, but the social and behavioral scientists did the research. Few nurses attended injury control and prevention conferences, and those who did were often coordinators of hospital-sponsored safety programs not there to present research. At public health conferences on violence and safety, nurses presented to other nurses, resulting in little interdisciplinary sharing of nursing experience and knowledge. Injury prevention journals rarely received nurse-authored manuscripts, and injury-focused books seldom had nurse contributors.
However, all this changed in recent years; and in this special journal issue, published by two prestigious nursing journals, nurse scientists present their state-of-the-art research on injury and safety. These presentations cover the methodological concerns specific to cross-cultural and international research and theoretical, ethical, and philosophic topics relevant to building the knowledge base. Currently, nursing textbooks cover nursing research on violence, injury, and safety to accompany class time devoted to this topic. Nurses share patients' stories and investigational insights valuable not only to other nurses but also to those in other disciplines. Universities and other institutions now fund nurse scientists to make presentations at interdisciplinary national and international forums on violence, and safety collaborative research is encouraged. Public health conferences offer multidisciplinary panels that now include nurse researchers. Injury prevention publications, however, still predominately receive and seek epidemiological and behaviorally focused contributions. Despite Florence Nightingale's (1858) visionary analyses of Crimean soldiers' death rates, nursing is still in infancy in this field of research.
After perusing the excellent presentations in this issue, I encourage nurses eager to build an interdisciplinary research program on injury or violence to also read my commentary on a new, compelling book, The Handbook of Injury and Violence Prevention (Doll, Bonzo, Sleet, Mercy, & Haas, 2007; http://www.nursing-research-editor.com/). The editors, all at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, acknowledge that violence research is more developed in some fields than in others. Nursing's contributions to the science of injury are unique and valuable. Congratulations to the authors who contributed to this special issue and to the editors of Nursing Research and Advances in Nursing Science.
Sherry Garrett Hendrickson, PhD, APRN, BC
Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing
The University of Texas at Austin
School of Nursing, Austin, Texas
[email protected]
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