Greetings! here's my vision.
Greetings, readers of the International Journal of Older People Nursing (IJOPN). I am happy to be addressing you here in our editorial feature as I embark on a journey as the new Associate Editor of this essential journal. You might ponder my use of the word essential here and wonder what my journey has to do specifically with you. Allow me to explain... When I say essential, I share with you the word that captures my vision for IJOPN. A vision which I believe Editorin-Chief Brendan McCormack and I wholeheartedly agree. My vision is that IJOPN becomes essential reading for each and every nurse around the world who cares for older people, teaches care for older people, or investigates the dimensions and properties of the care needs of older people and their families. A rather all-encompassing vision you might say. I agree. Influence and impact in an ageing world requires big thinking and even bigger action. The quality and quantity of evidence needed at basic, translational and implementation levels to establish and improve care for older people is staggering. As I travel around my own country – the United States – and around the world in places as diverse as Armenia and Hong Kong, unmet needs and questions that necessitate the development and advancement of nursing and interprofessional care for older people are exceedingly prominent. Among some of those questions are as follows: How do nurses meaningfully contribute to disease focused health care and highlight the issues of function and well-being as relevant concerns? In what ways can nurses shape health and social care in settings not traditionally identified with care of older people? Where might nurses influence the discourse about health and social care priorities in both more and less rapidly ageing societies? The questions are endless and their answers most often lacking in quality evidence or well-constructed and evaluated implementation of extant evidence. In an age where health and social care needs are pressing and information abundant, I believe we bear an even greater burden of evaluating available information and curating it in the context of current and projected needs. This burden is especially true for those of us who know that older people are the major consumers of health care and important users of social care as well. Trustworthy, well-curated evidence and information allows us to more successfully balance our roles in practice, education, research and policy making to achieve the ends we realise are necessary. We need trusted sources of impeccable quality to which we can turn to disseminate the evidence we generate and to identify that information we need to meet a present or projected challenge. While there are several wonderful journals in our discipline of gerontological and geriatric nursing around the world – I am privileged to be associated with the best of them in my country – I doubt there is consensus on which are our premier international journals. Although IJOPN is a journal somewhat newer than some around the world, I believe that it can become that journal. The journal with the significant and widespread reputation with an ever growing impact factor attesting to the fact that the papers it publishes are frequently cited and used by many scholars. Brendan McCormack, as Editor-in-Chief, has clearly and carefully laid the foundation for becoming that journal, the premier journal for gerontological and geriatric nursing around the world. I am truly honoured to be able to work with him to advance his vision for IJOPN and to promote it with mine. Here’s where you come in to my journey as IJOPN’s Associate Editor. My role involves critically thinking about and constantly collaborating with Brendan and our August Editorial Board [Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1748-3743/ homepage/EditorialBoard.html] to make IJOPN that premier international journal. We must continue to recruit the very best manuscripts, empanel more outstanding reviewers, and cultivate an even more exquisite review and decision process to bring important work to publication and to your attention in an efficient and timely way. Quality is critical to every step of the publishing process. A consistently high-quality process insures that a journal is reputed as truly trusted and well stewarded. IJOPN benefits from remarkable authors and a cadre of dedicated reviewers. Nonetheless, the goal to become the premier international gerontological and geriatric nursing journal calls for continual attention to you our readers and to those who submit to and review for IJOPN. Moreover, I believe we need to reach authors, reviewers and readers who may not think of themselves as traditional gerontological and geriatric nurses. You know the stereotype: we are nurses who