RNJ Corner – January 2020
Pamala D. Larsen, PhD, MS, RN, Editor-in-Chief
Linda Pierce, PhD RN CRRN FAAN, Associate Editor
Rehabilitation Nursing Journal presents two writing awards annually: the Editor’s Choice Award and the Clinical Article Award. This year’s Editor’s Choice award was given to the interdisciplinary team of Haley, Marino, Sheehan, Rhodes, Kissel and Roth. Their article in the November/December 2019 issue was titled “Stroke Survivor and Family Caregiver Reports of Caregiver Engagement in Stroke Care.” The authors interviewed 71 dyads, stroke survivors, and their caregivers to identify areas of caregiver engagement. Stroke survivors and caregiver reports of engagement were highly correlated, although caregivers reported a higher level of involvement. The clinical relevance of the study is that stroke clinicians need to recognize and facilitate caregiver efforts across all phases of stroke care. The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health.
Cabigon, Wojciechowski, Rosen, Miller, Mix and Chen authored the article given the Clinical Article award, titled “Interprofessional Collaboration and Peer Mentors for Bowel Education in Spinal Cord Injury: A Case Consultation.” The article was a continuous quality improvement (CQI) project that implemented the use of peer mentors in bowel education programs for individuals with spinal cord injury. Although peer mentors had been used before in other capacities at this inpatient rehabilitation hospital, they had never been used in bowel programs. The positive comments from patients with spinal cord injury have led to peer mentoring being incorporated into the bowel educational program on a permanent basis. This article appeared in the March/April 2019 issue of RNJ.
Excellent peer reviewers are essential in producing a quality journal. Their careful critique of manuscripts guarantees that the articles published in Rehabilitation Nursing Journal have undergone a thorough review, which results in the excellent articles that you see published in the journal. The importance of peer reviewers led to the establishment of the Reviewer of the Year award in 2019. Criteria were the quality of reviews, reviewing on a regular basis and the timeliness of follow through with the reviews. Don Kautz, PhD, CRRN, was named the Reviewer of the Year at REACH 2019.
RNJ is currently soliciting rehabilitation related manuscripts of all types, research, quality improvement and evidence-based practice projects, and clinical practice for 2020 and beyond! You can find submission guidelines here.
