MORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 13TH EAPC WORLD CONGRESS…
A new, prestigious ‘Paper of the Year’ award was made on the final day of the EAPC Prague Congress in recognition of the contribution of research to palliative care. Catherine Walshe, Editor in Chief, Palliative Medicine, and Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Manchester, explains.
On behalf of Palliative Medicine, I was delighted to announce the winner of our inaugural Palliative Medicine Paper of the Year award: John Galfin for his paper entitled, ‘A brief guided self-help intervention for psychological distress in palliative care patients: A randomised controlled trial’.1
The editors wanted to initiate this award to recognise the contribution of research to palliative care practice, policy, theory and methods. I am grateful for the assistance of two of our editorial advisory board members, Simon Noble and Jose Pereira, in helping me to make the final selection of the papers. We chose our winner from all the research papers published in the print editions of our journal in 2012, with the criteria for our choice centred on robust science and the potential for the research to contribute to palliative care. Congratulations to John Galfin and his colleagues for their worthy win this year.
In a message of thanks John said: “I was very proud to be part of a team that conducted a piece of research that was worthy of publication in Palliative Medicine, so to find out that our work was judged Paper of the Year has been a wonderful surprise. This was very much a team effort, so my thanks must go to my co-authors Professor Ed Watkins and Dr Tim Harlow for their support and insights.”
John paid tribute to the staff at Hospiscare in Exeter who had engaged with the project from the start and funded the research alongside Great Western Research. He concluded by thanking the people who had participated in the trial. “It was a privilege to be allowed to be with them at such an important time in their lives and touching to see the positive responses they had to the guided self-help therapy. I am delighted that Hospiscare have used our work to build their ‘Engaging with life’ programme for their patients, so it is great to see that our work has continued to positively impact on patient care, which is what we set out to achieve at the beginning.”
We plan that this will be the first of many annual awards highlighting the increasing quality of research in our field (and possibly the contribution of reviewers too in the future … watch this space!)
More good news…
Since writing this post, the 2012 Journal Impact Factors have been released. Whilst we’re well aware of the limitations of this metric, we are still delighted that Palliative Medicine’s new Impact Factor (IF) is 2.609, our highest yet. This puts us in the top quartile for all three categories we are listed in, the first time we have achieved this.
Other journals in the field have also performed well, showing the importance of this area of work, but we still maintain our position as a journal with one of the highest IFs in our field. We thank everyone involved for their support of all the hard work we’ve put in over the years to ensure that we work to publish the most rigorous and relevant research in palliative care to influence practice, policy, theory and education.
Reference
1. A brief guided self-help intervention for psychological distress in palliative care patients: A randomised controlled trial John M Galfin, Ed R Watkins, and Tim Harlow
Palliat Med, April 2012; vol. 26, 3: pp. 197-205. Subscribers to Palliative Medicine can access this paper in the archives of the journal.
Free access to ‘Editor’s choice’ papers on EAPC website…
Did you know that each month the EAPC blog features a post based on a longer article that has been selected as ‘Editor’s choice’ in Palliative Medicine? You can read the posts here. And if you’re an EAPC member, or a registered user of the EAPC website, you can also download a free copy of all ‘Editor’s choice’ papers from the EAPC website. (Just follow the instructions in the top right-hand corner of EAPC home page to register or login, and scroll down to download the article).
Prague Congress reports and presentations now online!
Even if you weren’t able to attend the 13th EAPC World Congress in Prague you can now find a selection of reports and presentations on the EAPC website. Click here to access the conference web page and then follow the instructions to login in the usual way.