I was delighted to be asked to become a member of the Editorial Board. It is a real privilege to be part of what I believe will be a force for change in the way our research informs and is used to improve how we treat and care for our patients, their families and communities. I first came to Slovakia a year after Brykczynska (1995) first published her report on the state of nursing in Central Europe. It was an exciting experience. In 1996 I attended the 2nd International Congress on Education in Nursing, and I have been coming back ever since. In my experience, the conference provides a show case for research and other scholarly activity that has been undertaken by academics, practitioners, those responsible for managing services and those involved in developing health care policy. The presentation of nursing work is well received and for some, the congress provides a first opportunity to share their work with a wider audience of peers. Unfortunately my knowledge of the Slovak language is still limited, but many of the presentations use English and there is always expert simultaneous translation available. I have been made to feel very welcome at the conferences and have been fortunate to be able to present my own work around mental health care and nurse education. I always learn a lot and over the 16 years have seen a growing confidence in how our achievements as nurses are captured and presented. This is an important aspect of both the conference and now this new journal.
The journal provides a place for both empirically based research papers and for papers that present the changes made in practice around treatments, interventions, the organisation of services and the care that can be provided. Likewise there is the opportunity to present new ideas around how nurses are prepared for practice or how they can improve their knowledge and skills. I believe there is a lot more to be said now about nursing education, practice and research. As a profession we need to find more ways of raising our profile and sharing our work. There are now some 35,000 nurses working in Slovakia, and the number of graduate nurses has risen by some 1500% since 2000 whereas every other health profession has remained static (Szalay et al., 2011). This gives nurses an increasingly powerful voice. As the provision of health care is affected by the wider international economic problems facing nations, using this voice to ensure that new ways of working (often with less resources) does not impact negatively on the provision of high quality nursing care and treatment becomes increasingly important. I hope that the work of the journal will help in this regard and I look forward to reading more of the work of nurses working in Slovakia.
Tony Warne
Professor in Mental Health Care
University of Salford, School of Nursing, Midwifery & Social Work
BRYKCZYNSKA, G. 1995. Nursing in Central Europe. London : Florence Nightingale Foundation, 1995.
SZALAY, T. – PAŽITNÝ, P. – SZALAYOVÁ, A. – FRISOVÁ, S. – MORVAY, K. – PETROVIČ, M. – VAN GINNEKEN, E. 2011. Slovakia : Health system review.In WHO Health Systems in Transition, 2011, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1-200.