Editorial

As I write this editorial, International Nurses Day is less than a week away and World Wellbeing Week is close on its heels in the last week in June: a near perfect alignment for any nursing journal editor but especially so for JRN as we take our 2020 focus on nurses and wellbeing into 2021.

Although World Wellbeing Week is a relative newcomer to the growing list of awareness dates, it is an important prompt to think more about how we as nurses, both individually and collectively, experience this multifaceted, sometimes ephemeral – yet fundamental – state of being. One approach might be to take forward the words quoted at the close of Smith et al.’s (2021) Perspectives article and become more comfortable and confident with being ‘feeling-thinking people, who do not separate the reason from the heart. Who feel and think at the same time, without divorcing the head from the body, and neither the emotion from the reason’ (Eduardo Galeano). To take this duality forward successfully nurses need to be supported personally and professionally to feel safe in their endeavours: Bosanquet (2021) explores this in the editorial accompanying her soon to be published on-line collection on Wellbeing.

Another way might be to become more daring in the ways through which we express and share our personal and professional wellbeing, or enable others to do this for us, so that the harmony and turbulence of nursing work is more readily accessible, and thereby better understood and respected by all. Nurses, and their work, have gained their most prominence in the last eighteen months, taking centre stage regularly both in news broadcasts and reporting, and also through the profusion of ‘pandemic-focused’ art. As this eclectic and often poignant collection has grown, it has brought the faces, and emotional and physical labour, of nursing into our homes, reminding everyone that nurses ‘feel and think at the same time’ and that doing so has an impact on their ‘well’being as well as other’s health.

Although art, in its myriad forms, can capture a particular time and set of experiences more imaginatively than the most exquisitely executed research study, it is increasingly obvious that we need both to expose and share how nurses ‘feel and think’ their nursing work. Melding art and research not only enables nursing to reveal more intensely its worth to the widest audiences, but also helps others appreciate the emotion as well as the reason that underpins its practices. One project doing this is The Frontline Archive created by Anglia Ruskin University's Story Lab - it's worth visiting and/or contributing to (https://storylabresearch.com/projects/the-frontline/).

JRN recognises this when it curates material for its readers by bringing together different forms of knowledge and styles of expression to connect policy, practice, and research. This can take many forms. In our May issue, Ann McMahon’s editorial reminded readers of the international on-line debate that JRN ran last November: ‘This house believes that a natural facet of nursing work is that it depletes nurses’ wellbeing’ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH028OJgI4iDYTaWmGq-o9g) and Pam Smith and the team supporting the motion reflected on the debate in their Perspectives piece in the same edition (Smith et al., 2021). This month the Foundation of Nursing Studies’ Chief Executive Joanne Bosanquet, who also took part in that debate, continues that theme. She draws together and edits an on-line collection of past papers on wellbeing to coincide with World Wellbeing Week. In this edition we have collected papers and commentaries on educational practices in Cameroon (Maboh et al.), aspects of care in coronary artery disease (Polsook and Aungsuroch), diabetes (Asshiddiqi et al.) and post-operative delirium (Igwe et al.), and health-seeking behaviours in college students (Tran and Silvestri-Elmore) as well as a poetic Perspective on the value and joy of research (Prabhu Navis).

Our next venture is to blend art and research by creating a graphic paper from this year’s Veronica Bishop Paper of the Year – watch this space!