Happy New Year and Happy 25th Anniversary to HPNA. Throughout 2011, JHPN will be celebrating this important achievement for the organization and for the field of palliative nursing.

This issue of the journal has a new look! We hope that you, our readers, are pleased with our new format. Each issue of the journal will now feature an HPNA member on the cover as "The Face of Palliative Nursing." You will also note a new series that is launched in this issue on "Research and Practice: Partners in Care." Each issue will include an article that is intended to promote the connection between practice and research. Each article is coauthored by a senior researcher/author partnered with a clinician/new author. It is exciting to see the power of research combined with practice to create an evidence base for quality care.

This issue of the journal includes very important articles illustrating current needs in palliative care. The article for our Research and Practice series by Chow and Coyle addresses family caregiver needs in bone marrow transplantation. This article highlights a valuable opportunity for integrating palliative care into the often neglected area of hematologic malignancies. The article by Melhado and Fowler Byers also addresses surrogates needs as they make decisions about withdrawing and withholding treatments.

It is timely as we launch this anniversary issue of JHPN that we also have articles focused on palliative care nursing. LeBaron and colleagues describe in their article a palliative care resource nurse team. This article offers readers a model for institution-wide efforts in palliative care. The article by Matsuyama and colleagues provides insight to the ongoing challenge of serving minority communities. A parallel article is included by Lavoie and colleagues exploring the issue of autonomy. These articles are a rich review of the complexity of our care and the many opportunities to extend our service.

And finally, the article by Keenan and colleagues presents a very important description of the first National Institutes of Health-funded Center for Excellence in End of Life Research.

I encourage all readers to visit the journal Web site, http://www.jhpn.org. There are several new or updated features including a reader's poll, collections of articles by topics, a "Publish Ahead of Print" section giving you access to a paper accepted for a future JHPN issue, and many other resources.

The journal congratulates HPNA CEO Judy Lentz and all of the leaders and members of our organization as we begin this 25th anniversary celebration. Every advance in the development of our field of palliative nursing is progress toward improved care for patients and families we serve.

Betty Ferrell, PhD, MA, FAAN, FPCN, CHPN

Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]